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A LIFE 

OF 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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(lynakeAiiearca^l/LcnoriM ynueiy at cJtrnth 



A LIFE 



OF 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



BY 

SIR SIDNEY LEE 



WITH PORTRAITS AND FACSIMILES 



NEW EDITION, REWRITTEN AND ENLARGED 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1916 

All rights restrved 






•I'V^.fc 



Copyright, 1898, 1909, and 1916, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



New edition, rewritten and enlarged. Set up and electrotyped. 
Published January, 1916. 



6-^ 



NoriDooft i^KBB 

J, S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



JAN 13 1916 

©CI.A418421 



IN PIAM MEMORIAM 

This King Shakespeare does he not shine 
in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as 
the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of 
rallying signs ; //^destructible ; really more 
valuable in that point of view than any 
other means or appliance whatsoever? 
We can fancy him as radiant aloft over 
all Nations of Englishmen, a thousand 
years hence. From Paramatta, from New 
York, wheresoever, under what sort of 
Parish Constable soever, English men and 
women are, they will say to one another, 
<Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we pro- 
duced him, we speak and think by him ; 
we are of one blood and kind with him.' 

(Thomas Carlyle : Heroes and Hero 
Worship [1841] : The Hero as Poet.) 



PREFACE 

The biography of Shakespeare, which I originally pub- 
lished seventeen years ago, is here re-issued in a new 
shape. The whole has been drastically revised and 
greatly enlarged. Recent Shakespearean research has 
proved unexpectedly fruitful. My endeavour has been 
to present in a just perspective all the trustworthy and 
relevant information about Shakespeare's life and work 
which has become available up to the present time. My 
obligations to fellow-workers in the Shakespearean field 
are numerous, and I have done my best to acknowledge 
them fully in my text and notes. The new documentary 
evidence, which scholars have lately discovered touching 
the intricate stage history of Shakespeare's era, has 
proved of especial service, and I have also greatly bene- 
fited by the ingenious learning which has been recently 
brought to bear on vexed questions of Shakespearean 
bibliography. Much of the fresh Shakespearean know- 
ledge which my personal researches have yielded during 
the past few years has already been published in various 
places elsewhere, and whatever in my recent publications 
has seemed to me of pertinence to my present scheme 
I have here co-ordinated as succinctly as possible with 
the rest of my material. Some additional information 
which I derived while this volume was in course of prepa- 
ration, chiefly from Elizabethan and Jacobean archives 
at Stratford-on-Avon and from the wills at Somerset 
House of Shakespeare's Stratford friends, few of which 
appear to have been consulted before, now sees the light 
for the first time.^ In the result I think that I may 

1 My transcripts of the wills of William Combe the elder (d. l6ii), 
and of his nephews Thomas Combe (d. 1609) and John Combe (d. 1614), 
have enabled me to correct the many errors which figure in all earlier 
accounts of Shakespeare's relations with the Combe family. Similarly the 



viii WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

claim to have rendered an account of Shakespeare's 
career which is more comprehensive at any rate than 
any which has been offered the pubUc previously. 

It is with pecuHar pleasure that I acknowledge the 
assistance rendered me, while these pages have been 
passing through the press, by M. Seymour de Ricci, a 
soldier and scholar of French nationahty who is now 
serving as an interpreter with our army in Flanders. 
M. de Ricci has in the intervals of active warfare sent 
me from the front, entirely on his own initiative, numer- 
ous suggestive comments which he had previously made 
from time to time on an earlier edition of my Life of 
Shakespeare. The conditions in which M. de Ricci has 
aided me pointedly illustrate the completeness of the 
intellectual sympathy which now unites the French and 
EngHsh nations. 

My gratitude is also due to Mr. F. C, Wellstood, 
M.A. Oxford, secretary and librarian to the Trustees 
of Shakespeare's Birthplace and deputy keeper of the 
Records of the Stratford Corporation, for the assiduity 
and ability with which he has searched in my behalf 
the collections of documents in his keeping. Finally, I 
have to thank my secretary, Mr. W. B. Owen, M.A. Cam- 
bridge, for the zealous service he has continuously ren- 
dered me throughout the laborious composition of the 
work. My sister. Miss Elizabeth Lee, has shared with 
Mr. Owen the tasks of reading the proofs and of com- 
piling the Index. 

Sidney Lee. 

London^ October 15, 19 15. 

will of the Southwark tomb-maker, Garret Johnson the elder, has helped 
me, in conjunction with documents belonging to the Duke of Rutland at 
Belvoir Castle, to throw new light on the history of Shakespeare's monu- 
ment in Stratford-upon-Avon Church and to solve some puzzles of old 
standing in regard to it. With the assent of the Trustees and Guardians 
of Shakespeare's Birthplace I purpose depositing in their library at Strat- 
ford, for the use of students, copies of all the fresh original material which 
I have gathered together in the interests of this volume. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION [1898] 

This work is based on the article on Shakespeare which 
I contributed last year to the fifty-first volume of the 
' Dictionary of National Biography.' But the changes 
and additions which the article has undergone during 
my revision of it for separate publication are so numer- 
ous as to give the book a title to be regarded as an in- 
dependent venture. In its general aims, however, the 
present life of Shakespeare endeavours loyally to adhere 
to the principles that are inherent in the scheme of the 
' Dictionary of National Biography.' I have endeavoured 
to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative 
of the great dramatist's personal history as concisely as 
the needs of clearness and completeness would permit. 
I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with 
a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their 
master's career. I have avoided merely aesthetic criti- 
cism. My estimates of the value of Shakespeare's plays 
and poems are intended solely to fulfil the obligation 
that lies on the biographer of indicating succinctly the 
character of the successive labours which were woven 
into the texture of his hero's Hfe. ^Esthetic studies of 
Shakespeare abound, and to increase their number is a 
work of supererogation. But Shakespearean literature, 
as far as it is known to me, still lacks a book that shall 
supply within a brief compass an exhaustive and well- 
arranged statement of the facts of Shakespeare's career, 
achievement, and reputation, that shall reduce conjecture 
to the smallest dimensions consistent with coherence, and 
shall give verifiable references to all the original sources 



X WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of information. After studying Elizabethan literature, 
history, and bibliography for more than eighteen years, 
I believed that I might, without exposing myself to a 
charge of presumption, attempt something in the way 
of filling this gap, and that I might be able to supply, 
at least tentatively, a guide-book to Shakespeare's life 
and work that should be, within its limits, complete and 
trustworthy. How far my belief was justified the readers 
of this volume will decide. 

I cannot promise my readers any startling revelations. 
But my researches have enabled me to remove some 
ambiguities which puzzled my predecessors, and to throw 
light on one or two topics that have hitherto obscured 
the course of Shakespeare's career. Particulars that 
have not been before incorporated in Shakespeare's bi- 
ography will be found in my treatment of the following 
subjects: the conditions under which 'Love's Labour's 
Lost ' and ' The Merchant of Venice ' were written ; the 
references in Shakespeare's plays to his native town and 
county; his father's applications to the Heralds' College 
for coat-armour ; his relations with Ben Jonson and the 
boy-actors in 1601 ; the favour extended to his work by 
James I and his Court; the circumstances which led to 
the publication of the First Folio, and the history of the 
dramatist's portraits. I have somewhat expanded the 
notices of Shakespeare's financial affairs which have 
already appeared in the article in the ' Dictionary of 
National Biography,' and a few new facts will be found 
in my revised estimate of the poet's pecuniary position. 

In my treatment of the sonnets I have pursued what 
I beheve to be an original line of investigation. The 
strictly autobiographical interpretation that critics have 
of late placed on these poems compelled me, as Shake- 
speare's biographer, to submit them to a very narrow 
scrutiny. My conclusion is adverse to the claim of the 
sonnets to rank as autobiographical documents, but I 
have felt bound, out of respect to writers from whose 
views I dissent, to give in detail the evidence on which 
I base my judgment. Matthew Arnold sagaciously laid 
down the maxim that 'the criticism which alone can 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION XI 

much help us for the future is a criticism which regards 
Europe as being, for intellectual and artistic^ purposes, 
one great confederation, bound to a joint action and 
working to a common result' It is criticism inspired 
by this liberalising principle that is especially applicable 
to the vast sonnet-literature which was produced by 
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is criticism of 
the type that Arnold recommended that can alone lead 
to any accurate and profitable conclusion respecting the 
intention of the vast sonnet-literature of the Elizabethan 
era. In accordance with Arnold's suggestion, I have 
studied Shakespeare's sonnets comparatively with those 
in vogue in England, France, and Italy at the time he 
wrote. I have endeavoured to learn the view that was 
taken of such literary endeavours by contemporary 
critics and readers throughout Europe. My researches 
have covered a very small portion of the wide field. 
But I have gone far enough, I think, to justify the con- 
viction that Shakespeare's collection of sonnets has no 
reasonable title to be regarded as a personal or autobi- 
ographical narrative. 

In the Appendix (Sections in. and iv.) I have supplied 
a memoir of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of South- 
ampton, and an account of the Earl's relations with the 
contemporary world of letters. Apart from Southamp- 
ton's association with the sonnets, he promoted Shake- 
speare's welfare at an early stage of the dramatist's 
career, and I can quote the authority of Malone, who 
appended a sketch of Southampton's history to his 
biography of Shakespeare (in the ' Variorum ' edition 
of 1 821), for treating a knowledge of Southampton's 
life as essential to a full knowledge of Shakespeare's. 
I have also printed in the Appendix a detailed state- 
ment of the precise circumstances under which Shake- 
speare's sonnets were published by Thomas Thorpe in 
1609 (Section v.), and a review of the facts that seem to 
me to confute the popular theory that Shakespeare was 
a friend and protege of William Herbert, third Earl of 

1 Arnold wrote ' spiritual,' but the change of epithet is needful to render 
the dictum thoroughly pertinent to the topic under consideration. 



xii WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Pembroke, who has been put forward quite unwarrant- 
ably as the hero of the sonnets (Sections vi., vii., viii.).^ 
I have also included in the Appendix (Sections ix. and 
X.) a survey of the voluminous sonnet-literature of the 
Elizabethan poets between 1591 and 1597, with which 
Shakespeare's sonnetteering efforts were very closely 
allied, as well as a bibliographical note on a correspond- 
ing feature of French and Italian literature between 
1550 and 1600. 

Since the publication of the article on Shakespeare in 
the ' Dictionary of National Biography,' I have received 
from correspondents many criticisms and suggestions 
which have enabled me to correct some errors. But a 
few of my correspondents have exhibited so ingenuous 
a faith in those forged documents relating to Shake- 
speare and forged references to his works, which were 
promulgated chiefly by John Payne Collier more than 
half a century ago, that I have attached a list of the 
misleading records to my chapter on 'The Sources of 
Biographical Information ' in the Appendix (Section i). 
I beheve the list to be fuller than any to be met with 
elsewhere. 

The six illustrations which appear in this volume have 
been chosen on grounds of practical utility rather than 
of artistic merit. My reasons for selecting as the 
frontispiece the newly discovered * Droeshout ' painting 
of Shakespeare (now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gal- 
lery at Stratford-on-Avon) can be gathered from the 
history of the painting and of its discovery which I give 
on pages 528-30. I have to thank Mr. Edgar Flower 
and the other members of the Council of the Shake- 
speare Memorial at Stratford for permission to repro- 
duce the picture. The portrait of Southampton in early 
life is now at Welbeck Abbey, and the Duke of Port- 
land not only permitted the portrait to be engraved for 

1 I have already published portions of the papers on Shakespeare's 
relations with the Earls of Pembroke and Southampton in the Fortnightly 
Review (for February of this year) and in the Cornhill Magazine (for 
April of this year), and I have to thank the proprietors of those periodicals 
for permission to reproduce my material in this volume. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xiii 

this volume but lent me the negative from which the 
plate has been prepared. The Committee of the Gar- 
rick Club gave permission to photograph the interesting 
bust of Shakespeare in their possession/ but, owing to 
the fact that it is moulded in black terra-cotta, no satis- 
factory negative could be obtained ; the engraving I 
have used is from a photograph of a white plaster cast 
of the original bust, now in the Memorial Gallery at 
Stratford. The five autographs of Shakespeare's signa- 
ture — all that exist of unquestioned authenticity — 
appear in the three remaining plates. The three signa- 
tures on the will have been photographed from the 
original document at Somerset House by permission of 
Sir Francis Jeune, President of the Probate Court ; the 
autograph on the deed of purchase by Shakespeare in 
1613 of the house in Blackfriars has been photographed 
from the original document in the Guildhall Library by 
permission of the Library Committee of the City of 
London ; and the autograph on the deed of mortgage 
relating to the same property, also dated in 161 3, has 
been photographed from the original document in the 
British Museum by permission of the Trustees, Shake- 
speare's coat-of-arms and motto, which are stamped on 
the cover of this volume, are copied from the trickings 
in the margin of the draft-grants of arms now in the 
Heralds' College. 

The Baroness Burdett-Coutts has kindly given me 
ample opportunities of examining the two peculiarly 
interesting and valuable copies of the First Folio ^ in 
her possession. Mr. Richard Savage, of Stratford-on- 
Avon, the Secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, and 
Mr. W. Salt Brassington, the Librarian of the Shake- 
speare Memorial at Stratford, have courteously replied 
to the many inquiries that I have addressed to them 
verbally or by letter. Mr. Lionel Cust, the Director of 
the National Portrait Gallery, has helped me to estimate 
the authenticity of Shakespeare's portraits. I have also 
benefited, while the work has been passing through the 

1 For an account of its history see p. 537. 

2 See pp. 562-3 and 567. 



XIV WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

press, by the valuable suggestions of my friends the 
Rev. H. C. Beeching and Mr. W. J. Craig, and I have 
to thank Mr. Thomas Seccombe for the zealous aid he 
has rendered me while correcting the final proofs. 

October 12^ i8g8. 



CONTENTS 



In Piam Memoriam 
Preface 



Preface to 
(1898) . 



the First Edition 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 



Distribution of the name 
of Shakespeare .... 

The poet's ancestry . . . 

The poet's father settles in 
Stratford-on-Avon . . 

John Shakespeare in mu- 
nicipal office 



The poet's mother ... 6 
1564, April. The poet's birth 

and baptism 8 

Shakespeare's birthplace . 9 
History of the Premises, 

1670-1847 10 

Their present uses ... 10 



II 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 



The plague of 1564 . . . 


12 


1575 


The father as alderman and 






bailiff 


12 


'^'sn 


Brothers and sisters . . . 


!■=! 


1582, 


The father's financial diffi- 






culties 


14 




1 Shakespeare's school 


IS 




Shakespeare's curriculum . 


16 




Shakespeare's learning 


17 




The poet's classical equip- 






ment 


18 


1583. 


The influence of Ovid . . 


20 




The use of translations 


21 




The English Bible . . . 


22 




Shakespeare and the Bible 


2S 




Youthful recreation . . . 


23 





Queen Elizabeth at Kenil- 

worth 24 

Withdrawal from school . 25 

Dec. The poet's marriage 25 
Richard Hathaway of Shot- 

tery 26 

Anne Hathaway .... 26 
Anne Hathaway 's cottage . 27 
The bond against impedi- 
ments 27 

May. Birth of a daughter 29 
Formal betrothal probably 

dispensed with .... 29 
The disputed marriage 

license 30 



III 



THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD 



Husband and wife ... 32 

Poaching at Charlecote . 34 
Unwarranted doubts of the 

tradition 34 



1585 



Justice Shallow . . . 
The flight from Stratford 



35 
36 



XVI 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



IV 



THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 



1586 The journey to London . 37 

Alternative routes • • • 39 

Stratford settlers in Lon- . 40 

don 40 

Richard Field 41 



PAGE 

Field and Shakespeare . 42 
Shakespeare's alleged legal 

experience 43 

The literary habit of legal 

phraseology 43 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 



Early theatrical employ- 
ment 

The player's license . 
The acting companies 
The great patrons 
The companies of boys 



45 
46 
48 
49 
SO 



The fortunes of Lord 

Leicester's company . 51 

Tlie King's servants . . 54 

Shakespeare's company . 54 

His ties with the Lord 

Chamberlain's men . . 55 



VI 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 



•The Theatre; the first 

playhouse in England . 58 

' The Curtain ' 59 

Shakespeare at the ' Rose ' 60 
The founding of the 

' Globe,' 1599 .... 63 

The Blackfriars .... 64 

The ' private ' playhouse . 67 

Performances at Court . . 67 
Methods of presentation in 

public theatres .... 72 



The structural plan ... 73 

The stage 74 

Costume j'] 

Absence of women actors . 78 

Provincial tours .... 81 

Scottish tours 83 

English actors on the Con- 
tinent 85 

Shakespeare's alleged trav- 
els in Italy ..... 86 
Shakespeare's roles ... 87 



VII 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 



Pre-Elizabethan drama 

The birth of Elizabethan 
drama 

Amorphous developments 

Chronicle plays . . . 

A period of purgation . 

Shakespeare's debt to fel- 
low-workers .... 

The actor-dramatist . . 

Shakespeare's dramatic 
work 



90 

91 
93 
94 
94 

95 
96 

97 



1 59 1 
1591 
1592 
1592 



His borrowed plots . . 
The revision of plays 
Chronology of the plays 
Metrical tests .... 
The use of prose . . . 
Love's Labour's Lost . 
Two Gentlemen of Verona 
Comedy of Errors 
Romeo and Juliet . . 



99 
100 

lOI 
lOI 

102 
106 
108 
109 



CONTENTS 



XVll 



VIII 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 159I-1594 



PAGE 

Shakespeare as adapter of 

others' plays 115 

1592, Sept. Greene's attack on 

Shakespeare . . . .116 
Chettle's apology . . . .118 
Shakespeare's contribution 
to the First Part of 

Henry VI 119 

First editions of the Sec- 
ond and Third Parts of 

henry VI 119 

Shakespeare's coadjutors . 122 
Marlowe's influence . . . 123 

1593 Richard III 123 

Publication of Richard III 125 

1593 Richard II 126 

Publication of Richard II . 127 
Shakespeare and the cen- 
sor 127 



PAGE 

The plague of 1593 . . . 129 

1593 liius Andronicus . . . 130 
Publication of Titus . . . 131 

1594, August The Merchant of 

Venice 133 

Shylock and Roderigo 
Lopez 134 

Last acknowledgments to 
Marlowe 136 

Publication of The Mer- 
chant of Venice . . . 137 

1594 King John 137 

1594, Dec. 28. Comedy of Er- 
rors in Gray's Inn Hall . 139 

Early plays doubtfully as- 
signed to Shakespeare . 140 
Arden of Fever shatn (1592) 140 
Edward III 141 



IX 



THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 



1593, April. Publication of Ve- 

nus and Adonis, 1593 . 142 
First letter to the Earl of 

Southampton .... 142 
' The first heir of my in- 
vention ' 143 

The debt to Ovid .... 144 

Influence of Lodge . . . 145 

1594, May. Lucrece .... 146 



First edition of 1594 . . . 
Sources of the story . . . 
Second letter to the Earl 

of Southampton . . . 
Enthusiastic reception of 

the two poems .... 
Barnfield's tribute . . . 
Shakespeare and Spenser . 
Patrons at Court .... 



147 
147 



149 
150 
151 
153 



THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY 



The vogue of the Eliza- 
bethan sonnet .... 154 

Shakespeare's first experi- 
ments 155 

1594 Majority of Shakespeare's 
sonnets composed in 

1594 . 156 

Their literary value . . . 158 
Circulation in manuscript 159 
Their piratical publication 

in 1609 160 

A Lover's Complaint . . 161 
Thomas Thorpe and ' Mr. 

W. H.' 161 



The form of Shakespeare's 
sonnets 164 

Want of continuity . . . 165 

The two ' groups ' ... 166 

Main topics of the first 
' group ' 167 

Main topics of the second 
' group ' 168 

Lack of genuine sentiment 
in Elizabethan sonnets . 169 

Their dependence on 
French and Italian 
modes 170 



XVIU 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



PAGE 

Sonnetteers' admissions of 
insincerity 173 

Contemporary censure of 
sonnetteers' false senti- 
ment 174 

' Gulling sonnets ' . . . . 175 



PAGE 

Shakespeare's scornful al- 
lusion to sonnets in his 
plays 17s 

The conventional profes- 
sions of sincerity . . . 176 



XI 

THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 



Slender autobiographical 
element in Shakespeare's 

sonnets 177 

The imitative element . . 178 
The illusion of autobio- 
graphic confessions . . 178 
Shakespeare's Platonic 

conceptions 179 

The debt to Ovid's cosmic 

theory 180 

Shakespeare's borrowed 

physiography .... 181 

Other philosophic conceits 182 

Amorous conceits . . . 183 

The theme of ' unthrifty 

loveliness ' 185 



Shakespeare's claims of 
immortality for his son- 
nets 186 

Conceits in sonnets ad- 
dressed to a woman . . 190 

The praise of ' blackness ' 191 

The sonnets of vitupera- 
tion 192 

Jodelle's ' Contr' Amours ' 193 

Gabriel Harvey's ' Amo- 
rous Odious Sonnet ' . . 194 

The convention of ' the 
dark lady ' 194 



XII 

THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 



Biographic fact in the 
' dedicatory ' sonnets . . 196 

The Earl of Southampton 
the poet's sole patron . 197 

I. The 'dedicatory' son- 
nets 197 

Rivals in Southampton's 

favour 200 

Shakespeare's fear of rival 

poet 201 

Barnabe Barnes probably 

the rival 201 

Other theories as to the 

rival's identity .... 203 

I I . Sonnets of friendship . 205 
Classical traditions of 

friendship 205 

Figurative language of love 206 
Gabriel Harvey ' courts ' 

Sir Philip Sidney . . . 208 
Shakespeare's assurances 

of affection 210 

Tasso and the Duke of 

Ferrara 211 

Jodelle's sonnets to his 

patron 212 

HI. The sonnets of in- 
trigue 214 



The conflict of love and 

friendship 215 

Boccaccio's treatment of 

the theme 216 

Palamon and Arcite . . . 216 
Tito and Gesippo . . . 216 
Lyly's Euphues and Phil- 

autus 217 

Clement Marot's testimony 218 
The crisis of the Two Gen- 
tlemen 218 

The likelihood of a per- 
sonal experience . . . 219 
External evidence . . . 219 
Willobie his Avisa . . .219 
Direct references to South- 
ampton in the sonnets of 

friendship 222 

His youthfulness .... 223 
The evidence of portraits . 224 
Sonnet cvii the last of the 

series 226 

Allusion to Elizabeth's 
death ....... 227 

Allusions to Southampton's 

release from prison . . 227 
Summary of conclusions 
respecting the ' Sonnets ' 229 



CONTENTS 



XIX 



XIII 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 



PAGE 

1594-5 Midsummer Night's 

Dream 232 

The Sources 232 

1595 All's Well that Ends Well 233 
The heroine Helena . . . 234 
The puzzle of the style . . 234 

1595 The Taming of the Shrew 235 

The underplot 236 

Stratford allusions in the 

Induction 236 

Wincot 237 

1597 Henry IV 239 

The historical incident . . 239 
More Stratford memories . 240 
King Henry IV and his 

foils 241 

Falstaff 241 

The first protest .... 241 
Falstaff and Oldcastle . . 244 
Falstaff 's personality . . 245 

1597 The Merry Wives of 

Windsor 246 

Falstaff and Queen Eliza- 
beth 246 

The plot 247 

The text of The Merry 
Wives 249 

1598 Henry V 250 

The text 250 

Popularity of the topic . . 251 

The choruses 251 

The soldiers in the cast . 252 
Shakespeare and the Earl 

of Essex 253 



PAGE 

Essex and the rebellion of 
1601 253 

The Globe and Essex's 
rebellion 254 

Shakespeare's popularity 
and influence .... 255 

The Mermaid meetings . 257 

1598 Meres's eulogy .... 258 
The growing ' worship ' of 

Shakespeare as drama- 
tist 259 

Publishers' unprincipled 
use of Shakespeare's 
name 260 

False ascriptions of plays 
in his lifetime .... 260 

A 'Yorkshire Tragedy . . 262 

False ascriptions after his 
death 263 

The Mtrry Devill of Ed- 
monton 264 

Mucedorus 265 

Fairs Em 266 

1599 The Passionate Pilgrim . 267 
The third edition, 1612 . . 268 
Thomas Heywood's protest 

in Shakespeare's name . 269 

1600 The Phoenix and the 

Turtle 270 

Sir John Salisbury's pat- 
ronage of poets . . . 270 
Robert Chester's work . . 271 
Shakespeare and his fel- 
low-contributors . . . 272 



XIV 



THE JPRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 



Shakespeare's residences 

in London 274 

" His fiscal obligation . . . 274 

In Southwark 275 

A lodger in Silver Street, 

Cheapside, 1604 . . . 276 
Shakespeare's practical 

temperament .... 278 

His father's difficulties . . 279 

His wife's debt .... 280 

1596 Death of his only son . . 281 

1596-9 Shakespeare and the 

Heralds' College . . .281 
The draft ' Coat ' of 1596 . 282 



The exemplification of 1599 283 
Other actors' heraldic pre- 
tensions 285 

Contemporary criticism of 
Shakespeare's arms . . 286 

1597, May 4. Purchase of New 

Place 287 

Shakespeare and his fel- 
low-townsmen in 1598 . 290 
1598 Richard Quiney's mission 

to London 292 

Local appeals for aid . . 294 

1598, Oct. 2^1. Richard Quiney's 

letter to Shakespeare . 294 



XX 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



XV 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 



Financial position before 

1599 296 

Dramatists' fees until 1599 296 
Affluence of actors . . . 298 
Fees for Court perform- 
ances 299 

Shakespeare's average in- 
come before 1599 . . . 300 
Shakespeare's share in the 

Globe theatre from 1599 300 
As a lessee of the site . . 301 
As an actor shareholder . 302 
The history of Shake- 
speare's shares, 1599-1616 304 
Shakespeare's share in the 

Blackfriars from 1608 . 306 
The takings at the Globe, 
1599-1613 307 



PAGE 

The takings at the Black- 
friars from 1608 .... 309 
The pecuniary profits of 
Shakespeare's theatrical 

shares 309 

Shareholders' lawsuits . . 310 
Increased fees from the 
Court under James I . . 313 

Salary as actor 314 

Later income as dramatist 314 
Shakespeare's final income 315 
1601-8 Domestic incident . . 315 
1601-10 Formation of the estate 

at Stratford 317 

The Stratford tithes . . . 319 
Recovery of small debts . 321 



XVI 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 



Literary work in 1599 . . 323 
1599 Much Ado about Nothing . ^I'^.'it 
The Italian source . . . 324 
Shakespeare's embellish- 
ments 325 

1599 As You Like ft .... 325 
The original characters . 326 

1600 Twelfth Night 327 

The performance in Mid- 
dle Temple Hall, Feb. 2, 
1602 328 

The Italian plot .... 328 
' Gli Ingannati ' of Siena . 329 
Bandello's ' Nicuola ' . . 329 
The new draviatis personcB 330 
The publication of the ro- 
mantic trilogy .... 331 

1600 Julius CcBsar 332 

Popularity of the theme . 333 
The debt to Plutarch . . 333 
Shakespeare's and other 

plays about Ceesar . . 334 
Shakespeare's political in- 
sight 335 

His conception of Csesar . 336 

A rival piece 336 

The Lord Mayor and the 

theatres 336 

1600, June 22. The Privy Coun- 
cil Order 338 

1601 The strife between adult 

and boy actors .... 340 



Shakespeare on the winter 

season 1600- i .... 341 
The actor's share in John- 
son's literary controver- 
sies, 1598-1601 .... 342 
Histriomastix, 1598 . . . 343 
livery 7nan out of his Hu- 
mour, 1599 343 

Cy?ithia's Revels .... 344 
Jack Drum's Entertain- 
ment, 1600 344 

Poetaster, 1601 345 

Dekker's Satiroinastix , 

1601 346 

The end of the dramatists' 

war 346 

Shakespeare and the ' po- 

etomachia ' 347 

Shakespeare's references to 

the struggle 348 

His disinterested attitude . 349 
Virgil in Johnson's Poetas- 
ter 350 

The Return fro7H Parnas- 
sus, 1601 351 

Shakespeare's alleged 

' purge ' 352 

1602 Hamlet 353 

The Danish legend . . . 353 

The old play 355 

Kyd's authorship .... 356 
Revivals of the old piece . 357 



CONTENTS 



XXI 



The reception of Shake- 
speare's tragedy . . . 357 
Gabriel Harvey's comment 358 
Anthony Scololcer's notice 359 
The problem of publication 360 
The First Quarto, 1603 . . 360 
Shakespeare's first rough 

draft 362 

The Second Quarto, 1604 . 363 
The First Folio version . 364 



Permanent Popularity of 

Hamlet , 

1603 Troilus and Cressida 

The publication of 1609 
The First Folio version 
Treatment of the theme 
Source of the plot . , 
Shakespeare's acceptance 
of a mediaeval tradition . 



364 
366 

367 
368 
368 
369 

370 



XVII 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 



Last performances before 
Queen Elizabeth . . . 372 
1603, March 24. Shakespeare and 

the Queen 's death . . . 373 
James Fs accession . . . 375 
1603, May 19. The royal patent 
to Shakespeare's com- 
pany 375 

Shakespeare as groom of 

the chamber 375 

1603, Dec. 2. At Wilton . . . 377 



1603-4, Christinas. At Hampton 

Court 378 

1604, March 15. The royal prog- 
ress through London . . 379 

1604, Aug. 9-28. The actors at 

Somerset House . . . 380 
Revival of Love's Labour s 
Lost 382 

1604-5 Shakespeare's plays at 

Court 383 



XVIII 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 



1604 Othello (Nov.) and Meas- 
ure for Measure (Dec.) 385 
Their performances at 

Court 385 

Publication of Othello . . 387 
Cinthio's novels .... 387 
Shakespeare and the Ital- 
ian tale of Othello . . . 387 
Artistic unity of the tragedy 389 
The theme of Measure for 

Aleasure 389 

Cinthio's tale 389 

Shakespeare's variations . 390 

1606 Macbeth ■ . . 392 

The legend in Holinshed . 392 
The, appeal to James I . . 392 
The scenic elaboration . . 393 
The chief characters . . . 394 
Exceptional features . . . 394 
Signs of other pens . . . 395 

1607 A ing Lear 395 

The Quarto of 1608 . . . 396 
Holinshed and the story of 

Lear 397 

The old play 398 

Shakespeare's innovations 398 



The greatness of A'«'»^Z,ifar 399 
1608 Tim on of Athens .... 400 
Timon and Plutarch . . 400 
The episode of Alcibiades 401 
The divided authorship . 401 

1608 Pericles 402 

The original legend of 

Pericles 402 

Incoherences of the piece . 403 
The issues in quarto . . . 404 
Shakespeare's share . . . 405 
George Wilkins's novel of 
Pericles 406 

1608 Antony and Cleopatra . . 406 
Plutarch's Life of Antony . 407 
Shakespeare's debt to Plu- 
tarch 408 

Shakespeare's re-creation 

of the story 409 

The style of the piece . . 410 

1609 Coriolanits 410 

The fidelity to Plutarch . 411 
The chief characters of the 

tragedy 412 

The political crisis of the 
play 413 



xxu 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



XIX 



THE LATEST PLAYS 



Shakespeare's ' tragic pe- 
riod,' 1600-9 415 

Popularity of tragedy . . 416 

Shakespeare's return to 
romance 416 

The second romantic tril- 
ogy and the First Folio . 419 

Performances of the three 
latest plays during 161 1 . 419 

1610 The triple plot of Cymbe- 

line 421 

Construction and charac- 
terisation 422 

161 1 The Winter's Tale . . . 423 
The debt to Greene's novel 423 
Shakespeare's innovations 424 
The freshness of tone . . 425 

1611 The Tempest 426 

The sources of the fable . 426 

The shipwreck 428 

The significance of Caliban 429 
Shakespeare and the 

American native . . . 430 
Caliban's god Setebos . . 431 
Caliban's distorted shape . 432 
The Tempest at Court . . 432 



PAGE 

The vogue of the play . . 433 
Fanciful interpretations of 

The Tempest .... 434 
Shakespeare's relations 

with John Fletcher . . 435 
The lost play of Cardenio . 435 
The Two Noble Kinsmen . 437 

The plot 438 

Shakespeare's alleged 

share 439 

Henry VI [I 440 

Previous plays on the topic 440 

All is true 441 

Holinshed's story .... 441 
Constructive defects in the 

play 441 

The scenic elaboration . . 442 
The divided authorship . 443 
Shakespeare's share . . . 444 
Wolsey's farewell speech . 444 
1613, June 29. The burning of 

the Globe 445 

Ben Jonson on the disaster 447 
The rebuilding of the 

Globe 447 



XX 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 



1611 Retirement to Stratford . 448 
Continued interest in Lon- 
don theatres 449 

Visits to the Crown Inn at 

Oxford 449 

The christening of Sir 

William D'Avenant . . 450 
Relations with actor friends 451 
Shakespeare and Burbage 452 
1613 The Earl of Rutland's ' im- 

presa' 453 

The sixth Earl of Rutland . 454 
1613 Shakespeare's purchase of 

a house in Blackfriars . 456 
1615 Shakespeare's litigation 
over the Blackfriars 

property 458 

1611 Shakespeare and the Strat- 
ford highways .... 459 
Domestic incident . . . 460 
Marriage of Susanna 

Shakespeare, 1607 . . . 461 
Marriage of Judith Shake- 
speare, 1616 462 



Growth of Puritanism at 
Stratford 463 

The fire of 1614 .... 464 

Shakespeare's social circle 
at Stratford 465 

Sir Henry Rainsford at 
Clifford Chambers . . 465 

Thomas Combe of the Col- 
lege 467 

John Combe of Stratford 468 

Coomb's legacy to Shake- 
speare 469 

Combe's tomb 470 

Combe's epitaph .... 470 
1614, Oct. The threatened en- 
closure 472 

The town council's resist- 
ance 473 

The appeal to Shakespeare 475 
1614, Oct. 28. Shakespeare's 
agreement with the 
Combes' agent .... 475 
1614, Dec. 23. The Town Coun- 
cil's letter to Shakespeare 476 



CONTENTS 



XXIU 



PAGE 

1615, Sept. Shakespeare's state- 

ment 478 

The townsmen's triumph, 

1618 479 

Francis Collins and Shake- 
speare's will 479 

1616, Feb.-March. Domestic af- 

fairs 480 

1616, March 25. The signing of 

Shakespeare's will . . . 481 
The five witnesses . . . 482 
1616, April 23. Shakespeare's 

death 483 

1616, April 25. Shakespeare's 

burial 483 

The minatory inscription 

on the tombstone . . . 484 
The will 485 



PAGE 

The religious exordium . 485 
Bequest to his wife . . . 486 

His heiress 487 

Legacies to friends . . . 488 
Thomas Russell, Esq. . . 490 
The bequests to the actors 490 
Overseers and executors . 491 
Shakespeare's theatrical 

shares 491 

The estates of contempo- 
rary actors 493 

The Stratford monument . 494 

Its design 496 

The inscription .... 497 
Shakespeare and West- 
minster Abbey .... 498 
Shakespeare's personal 
character 500 



XXI 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 



Shakespeare's brothers . . 503 
Shakespeare's widow . . 503 
Mistress Judith Quiney 

(1585-1662) 504 

Mr. John Hall 505 

Mrs. Susanna Hall (1583- 

1649) 506 

John Hall's notebooks . . 508 
The will of Mrs. Hall's son- 
in-law, Thomas Nash . 509 



Mrs. Hall's death .... 510 
The last descendant . . . 511 
Lady Bernard's will . . . 512 
The final fortunes of Shake- 
speare's estate .... 512 
The demolition of New 

Place, 1759 514 

The public purchase of 
New Place estate . . .514 



XXII 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMORIALS 



The relics of Shakespeare's 

handwriting 516 

The six signatures, 1612-6 517 

Doubtful signatures . . . 518 

His mode of writing . . . 519 

Spelling of the poet's name 520 

The autograph spellings . 520 

Autographs in the will . . 521 
'Shakespeare ' the accepted 

form 521 

Shakespeare's portraits . . 522 

The Stratford monument . 522 

Dugdale's sketch .... 522 

Vertue's engraving, 1725 . 523 

The repairs of 1748 . . . 524 

The ' Stratford ' portrait . 525 

Droeshout's engraving . . 526 

The first state 527 



The original source of 

Droeshout's work . . . 528 
The ' Flower ' or ' Droes- 

hout ' portrait .... 528 
The ' Ely House ' portrait . 530 
Lord Clarendon's picture . 531 

Later portraits 531 

The ' Chandos ' portrait . 532 
The ' Janssen ' portrait . . 534 
The ' Felton ' portrait . . 535 
The ' Soest ' portrait . . . 536 

Miniatures 536 

The Garrick Club bust . . 537 
Alleged death-mask . . . 538 
Sculptured memorials in 

public places .... 539 
The Stratford memorials . 540 



XXIV 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



XXIII 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 



1623 



PAGE 

Early issues of the narra- 
tive poems 542 

Posthumous issues of the 

poems 542 

The Passionate Pilgrim . 543 

Tlie Sonnets 543 

The Poems of 1640 . . . 544 
Quartos of the plays in the 

poet's lifetime .... 546 
The managers' objections 

to their issue .... 546 
The source of the ' copy ' . 547 
The various lifetime edi- 
tions 547 

The four unquestioned 

quartos of 1619 .... 548 
The five suspected quartos 

of 1619 549 

The charge against Pavier 549 
The posthumous issue of 

Othello 550 

The scarcity of the quartos 550 
The chief collections of 
quartos ...... 551 

The First Folio .... 552 

Editors, printers, and pub- 
lishers 552 



The license of Nov. 8, 1623 554 



The order of the plays 
The prefatory matter 
The actors' addresses 
Their alleged authorship 

by Ben Jonson . . . 
Editorial professions . . 
The source of the ' copy 
The textual value of the 

newly printed plays 
The eight neglected quar- 
tos 

The eight reprinted quartos 
The typography . 
Irregular copies . 
The Sheldon copy 
Jaggard's presentation 

copy of the First Folio 
The Turbutt copy . . 
Estimated number of ex- 
tant copies . . 
Continental copies 
The pecuniary value of the 
First Folio 
1632 The Second Folio 
1663-4 The Third Folio 
1685 The Fourth Folio 



555 
555 
556 

556 
557 
557 

559 

559 
560 

561 
561 
562 

564 
565 

566 
567 

567 
568 

569 
57° 



XXIV 



!!F EDtTORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER 



e - -rilexities of the 

early texts 571 

Eighteenth-century editors 571 
Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) 572 
Alexander Pope (1688- 

1744) 573 

Lewis Theobald (1688- 

1744) 574 

Sir 1 homas Hanmer 

(1677-1746) 576 

Bishop Warburton (1698- 

1779)- 577 

Dr. Johnson (1709-1784) . 578 
Edward Capell (1713- 

1781) 578 

George Steevens (1736- 

1800) 579 



Edmund Malone (1741- 

1812) 580 

' Variorum ' editions . . . 581 
The new ' Variorum ' . . 582 
Nineteenth -century edi- 
tors 582 

Alexander Dyce (1798- 

1869) 583 

Howard Staunton (1810- 

1874) 583 

Nikolaus Dehus (1813- 

1888) 583 

The Cambridge edition 

(1863-6) 583 

Other nineteenth-century 
or twentieth-century edi- 
tions 583 



CONTENTS 



XXV 



XXV 

SHAKESPEARE'S POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA 

PAGE 



PAGE 

Shakespeare and the clas- 
sicists 586 

Ben Jonson's tribute, 1623 587 
The eulogies of 1632 . . 588 
Admirers in Charles I's 



Critics of the Restoration . 590 
Dryden's verdict .... 591 
Shakespeare's fashionable 

vogue 592 

The Restoration adapters . 592 
The 'revised' versions, 

1662-80 594 

Shakespearean criticism 

from 1702 onwards . . 595 
The growth of critical in- 
sight 596 

The modern schools of 

criticism 596 

The new aesthetic school . 597 
Shakespeare publishing 
societies 598 



598 
599 

599 
600 



600 



Shakespeare's fame at 

Stratford-on-Avon . . 

Garrick at Stratford . . . 

' The Stratford Jubilee,' 

1769 • 

On the English stage . . 
The first appearance of 

actresses in Shake- 
spearean parts . 
David Garrick (1717-1779) 601 
John Phihp Kemble (1757- 

1823) 603 

Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1755- 

1831) 603 

Edmund Kean (1787-1833) 603 
William Charles Macready 

(1793-1873) 604 

Recent revivals .... 604 
The spectacular setting of 

Shakespearean drama . 606 
Shakespeare in English 

music and art . . . . 607 
Shakespeare in America . 608 



XXVI 



SHAKESPEARE'S 

In Germany 610 

Early German Shake- 

speareana 611 

Lessing's tribute, 1759 . . 612 
Growth of study and en- 
thusiasm 613 

Schlegel's translation . . 613 
Modern German writers on 

Shakespeare 615 

On the German stage . . 616 
Shakespearean German 

music 618 

In France 618 

Voltaire's estimate . . . 619 
Voltaire's opponents . . 619 
The first French translations 620 
French critics' gradual 
emancipation from Vol- 
tairean influence . . . 621 



FOREIGN VOGUE 



On the French stage . . 623 

In Italy 624 

Shakespeare and the Ro- 
mantic pioneers . . . 625 
Italian translations . . . 625 

In Spain 626 

In Holland 627 

In Denmark 627 

In Sweden 628 

In Russia 628 

The Russian Romantic 
movement and Shake- 
speare 628 

Tolstoy's attack, 1906 . . 629 

In Poland 630 

Polish translations . . .631 

In Hungary 631 

In other countries . . . 632 



XXVII 

GENERAL ESTIMATE 

Shakespeare's work and 
the biographic facts . . 633 

The impersonal aspect of 
his art 633 

Domestic and foreign influ- 
ences and affinities . . 634 



Shakespeare's receptive 

faculty 635 

General estimate of his 

genius ....... 636 

His final achievement . . 636 

Its universal recognition . 637 



XXVI 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



APPENDIX 



THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 



Contemporary records 

abundant 641 

First efforts in biography . 641 
Biographers of the nine- 
teenth century .... 642 
Stratford topography . . 643 
Speciahsed studies in biog- 
raphy 643 

Aids to study of plots and 

texts 644 

Concordances 644 

Bibliographies 645 



Critical studies .... 645 
Shakespearean forgeries . 646 
George Steevens's ' G. 

Peel' fabrication (1763) 646 
John Jordan (1746-1809) . 646 
The Ireland forgeries (1796) 647 
Forgeries promulgated by 
Collier and others ( 1835- 

1849) 647 

Falsely suspected docu- 
ments 649 



II 



THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY 



Perversity of the contro- 
versy 651 

Chief exponents of the 
Baconian and sceptical 
theory 651 



Its vogue in America . . 652 
The Baconians' plea's . . 653 
Sir Tobie Matthew's letter 

of 1621 653 

The legal sceptics . . . 654 



III 



TH^ YOUTHFUL CAREER OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 



Southampton and Shake- 
speare 656 

Parentage 656 

1573, Oct. 6. Southampton's 

birth 657 

Education 657 

Recognition of Southamp- 
ton's youthful beauty. . 658 



His reluctance to marry . 659 
Intrigue with Elizabeth 

Vernon 660 

1598 Southampton's marriage . 660 

1601-3 His imprisonment . . . 661 

Later career 661 

1624, Nov. 10. His death . . . 661 



IV 



1593 



THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 



Gervase Markham's sonnet 666 
Florio's address .... 666 
Thomas Heywood's tribute 667 
The congratulations of the 

poets in 1603 .... 667 
Elegies on Southampton . 668 



References in his letters to 




1595 


poems and plays . . . 


662 


iW8 


His love of the theatre . . 


663 


1625 


Poetic adulation . . . . 


663 




Barnabe Barnes's sonnet . 


664 




Tom Nashe's addresses 


664 





CONTENTS 



xxvu 



V 



THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND ' MR. W. H. 



The publication of the 

So7inets in 1609 .... 669 
Publishers' dedications . . 670 
Thorpe's early hfe . . . 671 
His ownership of the man- 
uscript of Marlowe's 

Lucan 672 

His dedicatory address to 

Edward Blount in 1600 . 672 
Character of his business . 673 
Shakespeare's sufferings at 

publishers' hands . . . 674 
The use of initials in dedi- 
cations of Elizabethan 
and Jacobean books . . 674 



Frequency of wishes for 
' happiness ' and ' eter- 
nity ' in dedicatory greet- 
ings 67s 

Five dedications by Thorpe 677 

' W. H.' signs dedication 
of Southwell's poems in 
1606 677 

•W. H.' and Mr. Wilham 
Hall 679 

' The onlie begetter ' means 
' only procurer "... 679 



VI 



'MR. WILLIAM HERBERT' 



Origin of the notion that 
' Mr. W. H.' stands for 
' Mr. Wilham Herbert ' . 

The Earl of Pembroke 
known only as Lord 
Herbert in youth . . . 



682 



Thorpe's mode of address- 
ing the Earl of Pembroke 



VII 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF PEMBROKE 



Shakespeare with the act- 
ing company at Wilton 
in 1603 686 

The dedication of the First 
Foho in 1623 .... 687 



No suggestion in the Son- 
nets of the youth's iden- 
tity with Pembroke . . 

Aubrey's ignorance of any 
relation between Shake- 
speare and Pembroke . 



689 



VIII 



THE 'WILL' SONNETS 



Elizabethan meanings of 
' will ' 690 

Shakespeare's uses of the 
word 691 

Shakespeare's puns on the 
word 692 

Arbitrary and irregular use 
of italics by Elizabethan 
and Jacobean printers . 693 



The conceits of Sonnets 
cxxxv-vi interpreted . . 693 

Sonnet cxxxv 695 

Sonnet cxxxvi 695 

Sonnet cxxxiv 697 

Meaning of Sonnet cxliii . 698 



XXVlll 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



IX 



THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, IS9I-IS97 



^5S7 

1582 

159I 



1592 

1592 
1593 
1593 
1593 

IS93 
1594 
1594 
1 594 
1595 



Wyatt's and Surrey's son- 
nets published .... 699 
Watson's Centm-ie of Lotte 699 
Sidney's Astrophel and 

Stella 700 

I. Collected sonnets of 

feigned love 701 

Daniel's Delia 701 

Fame of Daniel's sonnets . 702 
Constable's Diana . . . 702 
Barnes's sonnets .... 703 
Watson's Tears of Fancie 704 
Fletcher's Licia .... 704 
Lodge's Phillls .... 704 
Drayton's Idea .... 705 

Percy's Ccelia 705 

Z^epheria 705 

Barnfield's sonnets to 
Ganymede 706 



1595 Spenser's Amoretti . . . 706 

1595 Emaricdulfe 706 

^595 Sir John Davies's Gullinge 

Sonnets 706 

1596 Linche's Diella .... 707 
1596 Griffin's Fidessa .... 707 
1596 Thomas Campion . . . 707 

1596 William Smith's Chloris . joy 

1597 Robert Tofte's Laura . . 708 
Sir William Alexander's 

Aurora 708 

Sir Fulke Greville's Ccslica 708 
Estimate of number of love 
sonnets issued between 
1591 and 1597 . . . .709 

II. Sonnets to patrons, 

1591-7 709 

III. Sonnets on philoso- 
phy and religion . . . 710 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE SONNET IN FRANCE, 1550-1600 



Ronsard (1524-1585) and 
' La Pleiade ' . . . . 

The Italian sonnetteers of 
the sixteenth century . . 

Desportes (1546-1606) . . 



711 



711 
712 



Chief collections of French 
sonnets published be- 
tween 1550 and 1584 . . 

Minor collections of French 
sonnets published be- 
tween 1553 and 1605 . . 



Index 



712 



713 
715 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Frontispiece 

From the 'Droeshout' or ' Flower' pai7ituig, now in the 
Shakespeare Memorial Gallery, Strat/ord-on-Avon. 

HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, Third Earl of 

Southampton, as a young man .... To face p. 224 

From the painting at Welbeck Abbey. 

SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE to 

HIS DEPOSITION IN THE SUIT BROUGHT BY STEPHEN 
BeLLOTT AGAINST HIS FATHER-IN-LAW CHRISTOPHER 
MONTJOY IN THE COURT OF REQUESTS, DATED 

May II, 1612 -On page 517 

From the original docmnent now preserved in the Public 
Record Office, London. 

SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE to 

THE PURCHASE-DEED OF A HOUSE IN BlACKFRIARS, 

DATED March 10, 161 2-3 To face p. 456 

From, the original document now preserved in the Guild- 
hall Library, London. 

SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURE to 
a mortgage-deed relating to the house 
purchased by him in blackfriars, dated 
March ii, 161 2-3 " 458 

From the original docufnentnoiv preserved in the British 
MuseuTn. 

THREE AUTOGRAPH-SIGNATURES severally 

WRITTEN BY SHAKESPEARE ON THE THREE SHEETS 

OF HIS WILL " 486 

From the original doc 7i7nent at Somerset House, London. 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE « 538 

From a plaster-cast of the terra-cotta bust now in tlie pos- 
session of the Garrick Club. 

CONTEMPORARY INSCRIPTION in Jaggard's 

PRESENTATION COPY OF THE FiRST FOLIO . , On page 564 

Now belonging to Mr. Coftingsby Sibthorp. 
xxix 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 

Shakespeare came of a family whose surname was 
borne through the middle ages by residents in very 
many parts of England — at Penrith in Distnbu- 
Cumberland, at Kirkland and Doncaster in tionofthe 
Yorkshire, as well as in nearly all the mid- ^^™^" 
land counties. The surname had originally a martial 
significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the 
spear.^ Its first recorded holder is William Shakespeare 
or ' Sakspere,' who was convicted of robbery and hanged 
in 1248^; he belonged to Clapton, a hamlet in the 
hundred of Kiftergate, Gloucestershire (about seven 
miles south of Stratford-on-Avon). The second re- 
corded holder of the surname is John Shakespeare, who 
in 1279 was living at 'Freyndon,' perhaps Frittenden, 
Kent.^ The great mediaeval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, 
whose members included the leading inhabitants of 
Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the 
fifteenth century.^ In the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries the surname is found far more frequently in 
Warwickshire than elsewhere. The archives of no fewer 
than twenty-four towns and villages there contain 

1 Camden, Remaines, ed. 1605, p. iii ; Verstegan, Restitution, 1605, 
p. 294; see p. 151 infra. 

2 Assize rolls for Gloucestershire, 32 Henry III, roll 274. 

^ Plac. Cor. 7 Edw. I, Kane. ; cf. Notes and Queries, ist ser. xi. 122. 
^ Cf. Register of the Guild at Knowle, ed. Bickley, 1894. 
B I 



2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century, 
and as many as thirty-four Warwickshire towlis or 
villages were inhabited by Shakespeare families in the 
seventeenth century. Among them all William was a 
common Christian name. At Rowington, twelve miles 
to the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of 
Barlichway, one of the most proline Shakespeare families 
of Warwickshire resided in the sixteenth century, and no 
fewer than three Richard Shakespeares of Rowington, 
whose extant wills were i proved respectively in 1560, 
1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called William. 
At least one other William Shakespeare was during the 
period a resident in Rowington. As a consequence, the 
poet has been more than once credited with achievements 
which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous 
contemporaries who were identically named.-*^ 

The poet's ancestry cannot be defined with absolute 
certainty. The poet's father, when applying for a 
The poet's grant of arms in 1596, claimed that his grand- 
ancestry, father (the poet's great-grandfather) received 
for services rendered in war a grant of land in Warwick- 
shire from Henry VII.^ No precise confirmation of this 
pretension has been discovered, and it may be, after the 
manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious. But there is 
a probability that the poet came of good yeoman stock, 
and that his ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation 
were fairly substantial landowners.^ Adam Shakespeare, 
a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley Clinton 
in Warwickshire in 1389, seems to have been great- 
grandfather of one Richard Shakespeare who during the 
first thirty-four years (at least) of the sixteenth century 
held neighbouring land at Wroxall, some ten miles 
from Stratford-on-Avon. Another Richard Shakespeare 
who is conjectured to have been nearly akin to the 

^ See for ' other William Shakespeares ' Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's 
Environment, 1914, pp. 91-104. 

^ See p. 282 infra. 

^ Cf . The Times, October 14, 1895; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. vii. 
501; Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare's Family, 1901, pp. 35-49. 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 3 

Wroxall family was settled in 1535 as a farmer at Snitter- 
field, a village six miles south of Wroxall and four miles 
to the north of Stratford-on-Avon.^ It is probable that 
he was the poet's grandfather. In 1550 he was renting 
a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; 
he died at the close of 1560, and on February 10 of 
the next year letters of administration of his goods, 
chattels, and debts were issued by the Probate Court 
at Worcester to his son John, who was there described 
as a farmer or husbandman [agricola) of Snitterfield. 
The estate was valued at 35^. ijs? Besides the son 
John, Richard of Snitterfield certainly had a son Henry ; 
while a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landholder 
at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, whose parentage 
is undetermined, may have been a third son. 'The son 
Henry remained all his life at Snitterfield, where he 
engaged in farming with gradually diminishing success ; 
he died in very embarrassed circumstances in December 
1596.^ John, the son who administered Richard's es- 
tate, was in all likelihood the poet's father. 

About 1 55 1 John Shakespeare left the village of Snitter- 
field, which was his birthplace, to seek a career in the 
neighbouring borough of Stratford-on-Avon, then a well- 

^ Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1887, ii. 
207, and J. W. Ryland, Records of Wroxall Abbey and Manor, Warwick- 
shire, 1903, passim. 

2 The purchasing power of money may be reckoned in the middle of 
the sixteenth century eight times what it is now, and in the later years 
of the century when prices rapidly rose, five times. In comparing sums 
of money mentioned in the text with modem currency, they should be 
multiplied by eight if they belong to years up to 1560, and by five if they 
belong to subsequent years. (See p. 296 n. i infra.) The letters of ad- 
ministration in regard to Richard Shakespeare's estate, which are in the 
district registry of the Probate Court at Worcester, were printed in 
full by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Shakespeare's Tours (privately 
issued 1887), pp. 44-5, and again in J. W. Gray's Shakespeare's Mar- 
riage, pp. 259-60. They do not appear in any edition of HalliweU- 
Phillipp's Outlines. 

^ Henry Shakespeare, the dramatist's uncle, was buried at Snitter- 
field on Dec. 29, 1596, leaving no surviving issue. His widow Margaret 
was buried at Snitterfield six weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1596-7. Cf. Mrs. 
Stopes's Shakespeare's Environment, 1914, pp. 66 seq. 



4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

to-do market town of some two thousand inhabitants.^ 
In the middle of the sixteenth century the 
lithe °^^'^ main industries of Stratford were the weaving 
settles in of wool into cloth or yarn and the making 
on-Avon^ °^ malt. Some substantial fortunes were 
made out of dealings in wool, and on June 28, 
1 5 53 J ^ charter of incorporation (or of self-government) 
rewarded the general advance of prosperity. Some 
fifty-seven years later, on July 23, 16 10, the municipal 
privileges and franchises were confirmed anew by James 
I. Meanwhile, however, fortune proved fickle. As 
Queen Elizabeth's reign drew to a close, although the 
population was estimated to increase by half as much 
again, the manufacturing activities and the earnings of 
commerce and labour declined. The local trade tended 
to confine itself to the retail distribution of imported 
manufactures or agricultural produce. There were 
many seasons of scarcity and frequent losses by dis- 
astrous fires. Yet municipal life remained busy and 
the richer townsfolk and neighbouring landowners did 
what they could to lighten the borough's burden of 
misfortunes.^ 

In the middle years of the century there was every 
promise of a prosperous career for an enterprising immi- 
grant from a neighbouring village who was provided with 
a small capital. John Shakespeare arrived in Stratford 

^In 1547 the communicants residing in the main thoroughfares 
were reckoned at 1500; in 1562 the population would seem to have 
numbered as many as 2000. About 1598 the corporation when peti- 
tioning for an alteration of their charter reckoned the householders at 
1 500 ' at the least ' — a figure which would suggest a population of 
near 5000; but there was a possible endeavour here to magnify the 
importance of the place. (See Wheler MSS., Shakespeare's Birth- 
place, i. f. 72.) According to a census of April 19, 1765, the population 
only numbered 2287. The census of 191 1 gives the figure 8532. 

^ In 1590 the bailiff and burgesses complained that the town 'had 
fallen much into decay for want of such trade as heretofore they had 
by, clothing and making of yarn.' The decline seems to have made 
steady progress through Shakespeare's lifetime, and in 161 5 it was 
stated that ' no clothes or stuffs were made at Stratford but were bought 
at London or elsewhere.' (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 554-55.) 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 5 

on the eve of its incorporation, and he at once set up as a 
trader in all manner of agricultural produce and in many 
articles which were manufactured out of it. Corn, wool, 
malt, meat, skins, and leather were among the com- 
modities in which he dealt. Documents of a somewhat 
later date often describe him as a glover. Aubrey, 
Shakespeare's first biographer, reported the tradition 
that he was a butcher. But though both designations 
doubtless indicated important branches of his business, 
neither can be regarded as disclosing its full extent. The 
bulk of his varied stock-in-trade came from the land, 
which his family farmed at Snitterfield and in which he 
enjoyed some interest. As long as his father lived he 
seems to have been a frequent visitor to Snitterfield, 
and until the date of his father's death in 1560 legal 
documents designated him a farmer or 'husbandman' 
of that place. But it was with Stratford-on-Avon that 
his life was mainly identified. 

In April 1552 John Shakespeare was living in Henley 
Street at Stratford, a thoroughfare leading to the market 
town of Henley-in-Arden. He is first men- joj^ 
tioned in the borough records as paying in that Shake- 
month a fine of twelvepence for having a munid^i 
dirt-heap in front of his house. His frequent °^^^- 
appearances in the years that follow as either plaintiff 
or defendant in suits heard in the local court of record 
for the recovery of small debts suggest that he was 
a keen man of business. For some seven and twenty 
years his mercantile progress knew no check and his 
local influence grew steadily. In October 1556 he pur- 
chased two freehold tenements at Stratford — one, with 
a garden, in Henley Street (it adjoins that now known 
as the poet's birthplace), and the other in Greenhill 
Street with a garden and croft. Thenceforth he played 
a prominent part in municipal affairs under the con- 
stitution which the charter of 1553 brought into being. 
In 1557 he was chosen an ale- taster, whose duty it 
was to test the quality of malt liquors and bread. About 



6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the same time he was elected a burgess or town coun- 
cillor, and in September 1558, and again on October 6, 
1559, he was appointed one of the four petty constables 
by a vote of the jury of the court-leet. Twice — in 
1559 and 1561 — he was chosen one of the affeerors — 
officers appointed to determine the fines for those of- 
fences which were punishable arbitrarily, and for which 
no express penalties were prescribed by statute. In 
1 561 he was elected one of the two chamberlains of the 
borough, an office of financial responsibility which he 
held for two years. He delivered his second statement 
of accounts to the corporation in January 1564. When 
attesting documents he, like many of his educated neigh- 
bours, made his mark, and there is no unquestioned 
specimen of his handwriting in the Stratford archives; 
but his financial aptitude and ready command of figures 
satisfactorily relieve him of the imputation of illiteracy. 
The municipal accounts, which were checked by tallies 
and counters, were audited by him after he ceased to be 
chamberlain, and he more than once advanced small 
sums of money to the corporation. He was reputed to 
be a man of cheerful temperament, one of ' a merry cheek,' 
who dared crack a jest at any time.-*^ 

With characteristic shrewdness he chose a wife of 
assured fortune — Mary, youngest daughter of Robert 
The poet's Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote in the 
mother. parish of Astou Cantlow, three miles from 
Stratford. The chief branch of the Arden family was 

^ Archdeacon Thomas Plume (i 630-1 704) bequeathed to his native 
town of Maldon in Essex, with books and other papers, a MS. collection 
of contemporary hearsay anecdotes which he compiled about 1656. 
Of the dramatist the archdeacon there wrote that he 'was a glover's 
son' and that 'S[i]r John Mennes saw once his old f[athe]r in h[is] shop 
— a merry cheeked old man th[a]t s[ai]d "Will was a g[oo]d Hon[est] 
Fellow, but he darest h[ave] crackt a jeast w[i]th him at any time." ' 
(Communicated by the Rev. Andrew Clark, D.D., rector of Great 
Leighs, Chelmsford.) Plume was probably repeating gossip which he 
derived from Sir John Mennes, the versifier and admiral of Charles I's 
reign, who was only two years old when Shakespeare's father died in 
1 60 1, and could not therefore have himself conversed with the elder 
Shakespeare. No other Sir John Mennes is discoverable. 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 7 

settled at Parkhall, in the parish of Curdworth, near 
Birmingham, and it ranked with the most influential of 
the county. Robert Arden, a progenitor of that branch, 
was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1438 
(16 Hen. VI), and this sheriff's direct descendant, Ed- 
ward Arden, who was himself high sheriff of Warwick- 
shire in 1575, was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity 
in a Roman Catholic plot against the life of Queen 
Elizabeth. John Shakespeare's wife belonged to a 
humbler branch of the family, and there is no trust- 
worthy evidence to determine the exact degree of kin- 
ship between the two branches. Her grandfather, 
Thomas Arden, purchased in 1501 an estate at Snitter- 
field, which passed, with other property, to her father 
Robert; John Shakespeare's father, Richard, was one 
of this Robert Arden's Snitterfield tenants. By his 
first wife, whose name is not known, Robert Arden had 
seven daughters, of whom all but two married ; John 
Shakespeare's wife seems to have been the youngest. 
Robert Arden's second wife, Agnes or Anne, widow of 
John Hill {d. 1545), a substantial farmer of Bearley, sur- 
vived him ; by her he had no issue. When he died at the 
end of 1556, he owned a farmhouse and many acres at 
W^ilmcote, besides some hundred acres at Snitterfield, 
with two farmhouses which he let out to tenants. The 
post-mortem inventory of his goods, which was made on 
December 9, 1556, shows that he had lived in comfort; 
his house was adorned by as many as eleven 'painted 
cloths,' which then did duty for tapestries among the 
middle class. ^ The exordium of his will, which was 
drawn up on November 24, 1556, and proved on De- 
cember 16 following, indicates that he was an observant 

^ 'Painted cloths' were broad strips of canvas on which figures from 
the Bible or from classical mythology were, with appropriate mottoes, 
crudely painted in tempera. Cf. i Henry IV, iv. ii. 25, 'as ragged as 
Lazarus in the painted cloth.' Shakespeare lays stress on the embel- 
lishment of the mottoes in Lucrece, 245 : 

Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw 
Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe. 



8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Catholic. For his two youngest daughters, Alice and 
Mary, he showed especial affection by nominating them 
his executors. Mary received not only 6 /. it,s. ^d. in 
money, but the fee-simple of his chief property at 
Wilmcote, consisting of a house with some fifty acres 
of land, — an estate which was known as Asbies. She 
also acc[uired, under an earher settlement, an interest 
in two messuages at Snitterfield.^ But, although she 
was well provided with worldly goods, there is no sure 
evidence that she could write ; several extant docu- 
ments bear her mark, and no autograph signature is 
extant. 

John Shakespeare's marriage with Mary Arden doubt- 
less took place at Aston Cantlow, the parish church of 
The poet's Wilmcote, in the autumn of 1557 (the church 
birth and registers begin at a later date). On Septem- 
aptism. i^gj. ^^^ ^^^g^ ^j^^.^ ^^^^ child, a daughter, 

Joan, was baptised in the church of Stratford. A second 
child, another daughter, ]\Iargaret, was baptised on 
December 2, 1562 ; but both these children died in 
infancy. The poet WilHam, the first son and third 
child, was born on April 22 or 23, 1564. The later day 
was the day of his death, and it is generally accepted 
as his birthday. There is no positive evidence on the 
subject, but the Stratford parish registers attest that 
he was baptised on April 26, and it was a common prac- 
tice at the time to baptise a child three days after birth. 
The baptismal entry runs 'Gulielmus fiHus Johannis 
Shakspere.' ^ 

Som.e doubt has been raised as to the ordinarily ac- 

^ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 179. 

^ The vicar, who performed the christening ceremony, was John 
Bretchgirdle, M.A. He had been appointed on Feb. 27, 1559-60, and 
was buried in Stratford church on June 21, 1565. The (broken) bowl 
of the old font of Stratford church is still preserved there (Bloom's 
Stratford-upon-Avon Church, 1902, pp. 101-2). The existing vellum 
parish register of this period is a transcript of the original ' paper book ' ; 
it was made before 1600, in accordance with an order of Convocation 
of Oct. 25, 1597, by Richard Byfield, who was vicar for some ten years 
from 1596. 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH 9 

cepted scene of the dramatist's birth. Of two adjoining 
houses now forming a detached building on ghake- 
the north side of Henley Street and known as speare's 
Shakespeare's House or Shakespeare's Birth- ^'^^ ^^*^^' 
place, both belonged to the dramatist's father for many 
years and were combined by him to serve at once as 
private residence and as shop or warehouse. The 
tenement to the east he purchased in 1556, but there 
is no documentary evidence that he owned the house 
to the west before 1575. Yet this western house has 
been long known as the poet's birthplace, and a room 
on the first floor has been claimed for two centuries and 
more as that in which he was born. It^may well be that 
John Shakespeare occupied the two houses jointly in 
1564 (the year of the poet's birth), although he only 
purchased the western building eleven years later. 
The double residence became Shakespeare's property 
on his father's death in 1601, but the dramatist never 
resided there after his boyhood. His mother inhabited 
the premises until her death in 1608, and his sister Mrs. 
Joan Hart and her family dwelt there with her. Mrs. 
Hart was still living there in 16 16 when Shakespeare 
died, and he left his sister a life interest in the two houses 
at a nominal rent of one shilling. On Mrs. Hart's death 
thirty years later, the ownership of the property passed 
to the poet's elder daughter, Mrs. Hall, and on her 
death in 1649 to the poet's only granddaughter and last 
surviving descendant. Lady Bernard.^ By her will in 
1670 Lady Bernard made the buildings over to Thomas 
Hart, the dramatist's grandnephew, then the head of 
the family which supplied an uninterrupted succession 
of occupiers for the best part of two centuries. 

Early in Mrs. Joan Hart's occupancy of the 'Birth- 
place' she restored the houses to their original state of 
two separate dwellings. While retaining the western 
portion for her own use, she sublet the eastern half to a 
tenant who converted it into an inn. It was known at 

^'See p. 512 infra. 



lO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

iirst as the 'Maidenhead' and afterwards as the 'Swan 
and Maidenhead.' The premises remained subdivided 
thus for some two hundred years, and the inn 
theprwn° eujoyed a continuous existence until 1846. 
ises, 1670- Thomas Hart's kinsmen, to whom the ownership 
of both eastern and western tenements mean- 
while descended, continued to confine their residence to 
the western house as long as the property remained in 
their hands. The tradition which identified that tene- 
ment with the scene of the dramatist's birth gathered 
substance from its intimate association with his sur- 
viving kindred through some ten generations. During 
the eighteenth century the western house was a popular 
showplace and the Harts derived a substantial emolu- 
ment from, the visits of admirers of Shakespeare. 

In 1806 the surviving representatives of the Harts 
at Stratford abandoned the family home and the whole 
Their property was sold for 230/. to one Thomas 

present Court, the tenant of the eastern house which 
^^'^^^ still did duty as the 'Swan and Maidenhead' 

inn. Thereupon Court turned the western house into 
a butcher's shop.^ On the death of his widow in 1846 
the whole of the premises w^ere put up for auction in 
London and they were purchased for 3000/. on behalf 
of subscribers to a public fund on September 16, 1847. 
Adjoining buildings were soon demolished so as to 
isolate the property, and after extensive restoration on 
the lines of the earliest accessible pictorial and other 

^ In 1834 a writer in the Tewkesbury Magazine described 'Shake- 
speare's House' thus: 'The house in which Shakespeare's father hved, 
and in which he was born, is now divided into two — the northern [i.e. 
western] half being, or having lately been, a butcher's shop — and the 
southern [i.e. eastern] half, consisting of a respectable public-house, 
bearing the sign of the Swan and Maidenhead.' (French's Shake- 
speareana Genealogica, p. 409.) The wife of John Hart (1753-1800) of 
'the Birthplace,' son of Thomas Hart (1729-1793), belonged to Tewkes- 
bury and their son William Shakespeare Hart (i 778-1 834) settled 
here. The latter wrote of 'the Birthplace' in 1810: 'My grandfather 
[Thomas Hart] used to obtain a great deal of money by shewing the 
premises to strangers who used to visit them.' (Shakespeare's Birth- 
place MSS., Saunders MS. 1191, p. 63.) 



PARENTAGE AND BIRTH II 

evidence, the two houses were reconverted into a single 
detached domicile for the purposes of public exhibition ; 
the western house (the 'birthplace') was left unfur- 
nished, and the eastern house (the 'inn') was fitted up 
as a museum and library. Much of the EHzabethan 
timber and stonework survives in the double structure, 
but a cellar under the 'birthplace' is the only portion 
which remains as it was at the date of the poet's birth. ^ 
The buildings were vested under a deed of trust in the 
corporation of Stratford in 1866. In 1891 an Act of 
Parliament (54 & 55 Vict. cap. iii.) transferred the 
property in behalf of the nation to an independent body 
of trustees, consisting of ten life-trustees, together with a 
number of ex-officio trustees, who are representative of 
the authorities of the county of Warwickshire and of 
the town of Stratford. 

^ Cf. documents and sketches in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 377-99. The 
earliest extant view of the Birthplace buildings is a drawing by Richard 
Greene (1716-1793), a well-known Lichfield antiquary, which was en- 
graved for the Gentleman's Magazine, July 1769. Richard Greene's 
brother, Joseph (1712-1790), was long headmaster of Stratford Grammar 
School. In 1788 Colonel Philip De la Motte, an arch^ologist, of Bats- 
ford, Gloucestershire, made an etching of the Birthplace premises, v/hich 
closely resembles Greene's drawing; the colonel's original copperplate 
is now preserved in the Birthplace. The restoration of the Birthplace 
in 1847 accurately conformed to the view of 1769. 



II 

CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 

In July 1564, when William was three months old, the 
plague raged with unwonted vehemence at Stratford. 
The plague One in every seven of the inhabitants perished, 
of 1564. Twice in his mature years — in 1593 and 1693 
— the dramatist was to witness in London more fatal 
yisitations of the pestilence ; but his native place was 
spared any experience which compared with the calam- 
itous epidemic of his infancy.^ He and his family were 
unharmed, and his father liberally contributed to the 
relief of his stricken neighbours, hundreds of whom were 
rendered destitute. 

Fortune still favoured the elder Shakespeare. On 
July 4, 1565, he reached the dignity of an alderman. 

From 1567 onwards he was accorded in the 
as alder- ^"^ Corporation archives the honourable prefix of 
man^and 'Mr.'^ At Michaclmas 1568 he attained the 

highest ofhce in the corporation gift, that of 
baihff, and during his year of office the corporation for 
the first time entertained actors at Stratford. The 
Queen's Company and the Earl of Worcester's Company 
each received from John Shakespeare an official welcome, 

^ An epidemic of exceptional intensity visited London from August 
to December 1563, and several country towns were infected somewhat 
sporadically in the following spring. Leicester, Lichfield, and Canter- 
bury seem with Stratford-on-Avon to have been the chief sufferers in 
the provinces. (Creighton, Epidemics in Britain, i. 309.) 

^ According to Sir Thomas Smith's Commonwealth of England, iS94) 
'Master is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen.' 
Cf. Merchant of Venice, 11. ii. 45 seq., where Launcelot Gobbo, on being 
called Master Launcelot, persistently disclaims the dignity. ' ISfo master, 
sir [he protests], but a poor man's son.' The dramatist reached the 
like titular dignity comparatively early (see p. 293). 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 1,3 

and gave a performance in the Guildhall before the 
council.^ On September 5, 1571, he was chief alderman, 
a post which he retained till September 30 the following 
year. In 1573 Alexander Webbe, a farmer of Snitter- 
field, and the husband of his wife's sister Margaret, 
made him overseer of his will of which Henry Shake- 
speare, his brother, was executor. In 1 5 7 5 the dramatist's 
father added substantially to his real estate by purchas- 
ing two houses in Stratford ; one of them, the traditional 
'birthplace' in Henley Street, adjoined the tenement 
acquired nineteen years before. In 1576 Alderman 
Shakespeare contributed twelvepence to the beadle's 
salary. But after Michaelmas 1572 he took a less active 
part in municipal affairs, and he grew irregular in his 
attendance at the council meetings. 

Signs were gradually apparent that John Shake- 
speare's luck had turned. In 1578 he was unable to pay, 
with his colleagues, either the weekly sum of fourpence 
for the relief of the poor, or his contribution ' towards the 
furniture of three pikemen, two billmen, and one archer ' 
who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster 
of the trained bands of the county. 

Meanwhile his family was increasing. Four children 
besides the poet — three sons, Gilbert (baptised October 
13, 1566), Richard (baptised March 11, 1573-4), Brothers 
and Edmund (baptised May 3, 1580), with a and sisters. 
daughter Joan (baptised April 15, 1569) — ^ reached 
maturity. A daughter Ann was baptised on September 
28, 1 57 1, and was buried on April 4, 1579. To meet 
his growing liabilities, the father borrowed money 

^ The Rev. Thomas Carter, in Shakespeare, Puritan and Recusant, 
1897, weakly argued that John Shakespeare was a puritan from the 
fact that the corporation ordered images to be defaced (1562-3) and 
ecclesiastical vestments to be sold (1571), while he held office as chamber- 
lain or chief alderman. These decrees were mere acts of conformity with 
the new ecclesiastical law. John Shakespeare's encouragement of actors 
is conclusive proof that he was no puritan. The Elizabethan puritans, 
too, according to Guillim's Display of Heraldrie (16 10), regarded coat- 
armour with abhorrence, yet John Shakespeare with his son made per- 
sistent application to the College of Arms for a grant of arms. (Cf. 
infra, pp. 281 seq.) 



14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

from his wife's kinsfolk, and he and his wife mortgaged, 
on November 14, 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at 
Wilmcote, for 40I. to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on- 
the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden. 
Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was 
to take the 'rents and profits' of the estate. Asbies 
was thereby alienated for ever. Next year, on October 
15, 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, 
doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum of 
40/., his wife's property at Snitterfield.^ 

John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humilia- 
tion of having parted, although as he hoped only tem- 
porarily, with his wife's property of Asbies, and 
father's in the autumu of 1580 he offered to pay off 
financial ^j^g mortgage ; but his brother-in-law, Lambert, 
retorted that other sums were owing, and he 
would accept all or none. The negotiation, which was 
the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive.^ 
Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was 
embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ 
of distraint. Brown informed the local court that the 
debtor had no goods on which process could be levied.^ 
On September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alder- 
man's gown, on the ground of his long absence from the 
council meetings.'* 

^ The sum is stated to be 4I. in one document (Halliwell-Phillipps, 
ii. 176) and 40I. in another {lb. p. 179) ; the latter is the correct sum. 

2 Edmund Lambert died on March i, 1586-7, in possession of Asbies. 
Fresh legal proceedings were thereupon initiated by John Shakespeare 
to recover the property from Edmund Lambert's heir, John Lambert. 
The litigation went on intermittently through the next twelve years, 
but the dramatist's family obtained no satisfaction. Cf. Mrs. Stopes's 
Shakespeare's Environment, pp. 37 seq. 

' Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 238. The Henley Street property was ap- 
parent!}' treated as immune from distraint. 

^ The embarrassments of Shakespeare's father have been at times 
assigned in error to another John Shakespeare of Stratford. The second 
John Shakespeare or Shakspere (as his name is usually spelt) came to 
Stratford as a young man, married there on Nov. 25, 1584, and was for 
ten years a well-to-do shoemaker in Bridge Street, filling the office of 
Master of the Shoemakers' Company in 1 59 2 — a certain sign of pecuniary 
stability. He left Stratford in 1594 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 137-40). 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 15 

Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the 
education of his four sons. They were entitled to free 
tuition at the grammar school of Stratford, sj^^ke- 
which had been refashioned in 1553 by Edward speare's 
VI out of a fifteenth century foundation. An ^''^°°'- 
unprecedented zeal for education was a prominent charac- 
teristic of Tudor England, and there was scarcely an 
English town which did not witness the establishment in 
the sixteenth century of a well-equipped public school.^ 
Stratford shared with the rest of the country the general 
respect for literary study. Secular literature as well as 
theology found its way into the parsonages, and libraries 
adorned the great houses of the neighbourhood.^ The 
townsmen of Stratford gave many proofs of pride in the 
municipal school which offered them a taste of academic 
culture. There John Shakespeare's eldest son William 
probably made his entry in 1571, when Walter Roche, 
B.A., was retiring from the mastership in favour of 
Simon Hunt, B.A. Hunt seems to have been succeeded 
in 1577 by one Thomas Jenkins, whose place was taken 
in 1579 by John Cotton ' late ' of London.^ Roche, Hunt, 
and Cotton were all graduates of Oxford ; Roche would 
appear to have held a Lancashire fellowship at his col- 
lege, Corpus Christi, and to have left the Stratford School 
to become rector of the neighbouring church of Clifford 

^ Before the reign of the first Tudor sovereign Henry VII England 
could boast of no more than 16 grammar schools, i.e. public schools, 
unconnected with the monasteries. Sixteen were founded in addition 
in different towns during Henry VII's reign, 63 during Henry VIII's 
reign, 50 during Edward VI's reign, 19 during Queen Mary's reign, 
138 during Queen EUzabeth's reign, and 83 during James I's reign. 

^ The post-mortem inventory of the goods of John Marshall, curate 
of Bishopton, a hamlet of -Stratford, enumerates 170 separate books, 
including Ovid's Trisiia, Erasmus's Colloquia, Ascham's Scholemaster , 
Virgil, Aristotle's Problemes, Cicero's Epistles, besides much contro- 
versial divinity, scriptural commentaries and educational manuals. 
See Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environment (pp. 57-61). Sir George 
Carew (afterwards Earl of Totnes), of Clop ton House, Stratford, pur- 
chased for his library there on its publication in 1598 John Florio's 
Worlde of Wordes, an Italian-English Dictionary; this volume is now 
in the Shakespeare Birthplace Library. (See Catalogue, No. 161.) 

^ Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage, p. 108. 



l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Chambers. The schoolmasters owed their appoint- 
ment to the town council, but a teacher's hcense from 
the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) was a needful 
credential. 

As was customary in provincial schools, the poet 
learned to write the 'Old EngHsh' character, which re- 
Shake- sembles that still in vogue in Germany. He 
speare's was ucvcr tauglit the Italian script, which was 
cumcu um. ^^jj^j^jj^g j^g ^^y jj^ cultured society, and is now 
universal among Englishmen. Until his death Shake- 
speare's 'Old English' handwriting testified to his pro- 
vincial education.^ The general instruction was con- 
veyed in Latin. From the Latin accidence, boys of the 
period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were 
led, through Latin conversation books like the 'Sen- 
tentias Pueriles,' and the standard elementary Latin 
grammar of William Lily (first highmaster of St. Paul's 
School), to the perusal of such authors as Seneca, Ter- 
ence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace. Some 
current Latin literature was in common use in the lower 
forms. The Latin eclogues of the popular renaissance 
poet, Baptista Mantuanus, were usually preferred to 
Virgil's for beginners ; they were somewhat crudely 
modelled in a post-classical idiom on Virgil's pastorals, 
but were reckoned 'both for style and matter very fa- 
miliar and grateful to children and therefore read in 
most schools.' ^ The rudiments of Greek were occasion- 

^ See pp. 517 seq. infra. 

^ Cf. Charles Hoole's New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School 
(published 1660, written 1640). Evidence abounds of the popularity 
of Mantuanus's work, which Shakespeare quotes in the original in 
Lovers Labour's Lost (see p. 18 w. i). Drayton, a Warwickshire boy, 
records {Of Poets and Poesy) that his tutor 

First read to me honest Mantuan, 
Then Virgil's Eclogues. 

So Thomas Lodge {Defence of Poetry, 1579) : 'Miserable were our state 
if our younglings [wanted] the wrytings of Mantuan.' Dr. Johnson 
notes that Mantuan was read in some English schools down to the 
beginning of the eighteenth century {Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, iii. 317). 
Mantuanus's Eclogues have been fully and admirably edited by Dr. 
W, P. Mustard, Baltimore, 1911. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 1 7 

ally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very- 
promising pupils ; but such coincidences as have been 
detected between expressions in Greek plays and in 
Shakespeare seem due to accident, and not to any study, 
either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian drama. ^ 

Dr. Farmer enunciated in his ' Essay on Shakespeare's 
Learning' (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no 
language but his own, and owed whatever shake- 
knowledge he displayed of the classics and of speare's 
Italian and French literature to English trans- ^^™™s- 
lations. But several French and Italian books whence 

^ James Russell Lowell, who noticed some close parallels between 
expressions of Shakespeare and those of the Greek tragedians, hazarded 
the suggestion that Shakespeare may have studied the ancient drama in 
a Grace, et Latine edition. I believe Lowell's parallelisms to be no more 
than curious accidents — proofs of consanguinity of spirit, not of any 
indebtedness on Shakespeare's part. In the Electra of Sophocles, which 
is akin in its leading motive to Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for 
the supposed death of Orestes with the same commonplace argument 
as that with which Hamlet's mother and uncle seek to console him. In 
Electra are the lines 11 71-3 : 

Qvi)Tov TT^cpvKas TTaTpos, 'HX^KTjOa, (ppbvef 
Qvrjrbs d 'Op^cTTT^s • toare firj \iav arive. 
liacnv yap rifuv tovt ocpelkeTai Tradeiv 

{i.e. 'Remember, Electra, your father whence you sprang is mortal. 
Mortal, too, is Orestes. Wherefore grieve not overmuch, for by all of 
us has this debt of suffering to be paid'). In Hamlet (i. ii. 72 seq.) are 
the familiar sentences : 

Thou know'st 'tis common ; all that live must die. . . . 
But you must know, your father lost a father ; 
That father lost, lost his . . . But to persever 
In obstinate condolement is a course 
Of impious stubbornness. 

Cf. Sophocles's GLdlpus Coloneus, 880 : Tots rot diKalois xw /3paxi>s viKg. 
fiiyav ('In a just cause the weak vanquishes the strong,' Jebb), and 
2 Henry VI, iii. ii. 233, 'Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.' 
Shakespeare's 'prophetic soul' in Hamlet (i. v. 40) and the ^owwe^ (cvii. i) 
may be matched by the irp6/j.avTis 6vfx6s of Euripides's Andromache, 
1075; and Hamlet's 'sea of troubles' (in. i. 59) by the KaK^v iriXayos 
of iEschylus's PerscE, 443. Among all the creations of Shakespearean 
and Greek drama. Lady Macbeth and jEschylus's Clytemnestra, who 
'in man's counsels bore no woman's heart ' (yvuaiKos av5p6^ov\ov iXwl^ov 
Kiap, Agamemnon, 11), most closely resemble each other. But a 
study of the points of resemblance attests no knowledge of ^Eschylus 
on Shakespeare's part, but merely the close community of tragic genius 
that subsisted between the two poets. 



1 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare derived the plots of his dramas — Belle- 
forest's 'Histoires Tragiques,' Ser Giovanni's 'II Pe- 
corone,' and Cinthio's 'Hecatommithi,' for example — 
were not accessible to him in EngHsh translations ; and 
on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is 
adequately confuted. A boy with Shakespeare's excep- 
tional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a 
training in Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly 
lack in future years all means of access to the literature 
of France and Italy. Schoolfellows of the dramatist 
who took to trade and lacked literary aspirations showed 
themselves on occasion capable of writing letters in ac- 
curate Latin prose or they freely seasoned their famihar 
English correspondence with Latin phrases, while at 
least one Stratford schoolboy of the epoch shewed in 
manhood some familiar knowledge of French poetry.^ 
It was thus in accord with common experience that 
Shakespeare in his writings openly acknowledged his 
acquaintance with the Latin and French languages, and 
with many Latin poets of the school curriculum. In 
the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holof ernes in 'Love's 
Labour's Lost' and Sir Hugh Evans in 'Merry Wives of 
The poet's Windsor,' Shakespeare placed Latin phrases 
classical drawn directly from Lily's grammar, from the 
equipment. ^ gententi^ Pueriles,' and from 'the good old 
Mantuan.' ^ Some critical knowledge of Latin drama 

^ Cf. Richard Quiney's Latin letter to his father (c. 1598) in Malone's 
Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 564, and Abraham Sturley's English corre- 
spondence, which is studded with Latin phrases, in Halliwell-Phillipps, 
ii. 59. Thomas Quiney, a Stratford youth, who became one of Shake- 
speare's sons-in-law, when chamberlain of the borough in 1623 inscribed 
on the cover of the municipal account book the French couplet : 

Heureux celui qui pour devenir sage 
Du mal d'autrui fait son apprentisage. 

(See Catalogue of Shakespeare's Birthplace, p. 115.) 

2 From Mantuanus's first eclogue Holofernes quotes the opening 
words : 

Fauste, precor, gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra 

Ruminat 

{Love's Labour's Lost, iv. ii. 89-90). See p. 16 w. 3 supra. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 1 9 

is suggested by Polonius's remark in his survey of dra- 
matic literature : ' Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus 
too hght' ('Hamlet,' 11. ii. 395-6). Many a distinctive 
phrase of Senecan tragedy seems indeed to be interwoven 
with Shakespeare's dramatic speech, nor would the 
dramatist appear to have disdained occasional hints 
from Seneca's philosophical discourses.^ From Plautus's 
'Menaechmi' Shakespeare drew the leading motive of 
his 'Comedy of Errors,' while through the whole range 
of his literary work, both poetic and dramatic, signs 
are apparent of close intimacy with Ovid's verse, notably 
with the 'Metamorphoses,' the most popular classical 
poem, at school and elsewhere, in- mediaeval and renais- 
sance Europe. 

^ Apart from two Latin quotations from Seneca's Hippolytus in Titus 
Andronicus (of doubtful authorship), 11. i. 133-5, iv. i. 82-3, there are 
many notable resemblances between Seneca's and Shakespeare's language. 
The following parallel is typical : 

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand? {Macbeth, 11. ii. 60-1.) 

Quis Tanais aut quis Nilus aut quis persica 

Violentus unda Tigris aut Rhenus ferox 

Tagusve hibera turbidus gaza fluens 

Abluere dextram poterit? arctoum licet 

Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare 

Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus : 

Haerebit altum facinus. {Hercules Furens, 1330-6.) 

See J. W. Cunliffe's The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, 
1893, and his Early English Classical Tragedies, 191 2. Professor E. A. 
Sonnenschein in Latin as an Intellectual Force, a paper read at the Inter- 
national Congress of the Arts and Sciences, St. Louis, September 1904, 
forcibly argued that Portia's speech on mercy was largely based on 
Seneca's tractate De dementia. The following passages illustrate the 
similarity of temper : 

It becomes Nullum dementia ex omnibus magis 

The throned monarch better than his quam regem aut principem decet. 
crown. {Merck, of Venice, iv. i. {De dementia, i. iii. 3.) 

189-90.) 

And earthly power doth then show likest Quid autem ? non proximum eis (dis- 

God's locum tenet is qui se ex deorum natura 

When mercy seasons justice, (iv. i. gerit beneficus et largus et in melius 

196-7.) potens? (i. xix. 9.) 



20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Ovid's poetry filled the predominant place among 
the studies of Shakespeare's schooldays. In his earliest 
rpjjg play, 'Love's Labour's Lost' (iv. ii. 127), he 

influence cites him as the schoolboy's model for Latin 
° ^^ ■ verse : ' Ovidius Naso was the man : and 
why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the odorifer- 
ous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention ? ' ^ In his 
later writings Shakespeare vividly assimilates number- 
less mythological episodes from the rich treasury of the 
'Metamorphoses.' ^ The poems 'Venus and Adonis' and 
'Lucrece' are both offspring of Ovidian parentage; the 
first theme comes direct from the 'Metamorphoses' and 
is interwoven by Shakespeare with two other tales from 
the same quarry, while the title-page bears a Latin 
couplet from a different poem of Ovid — his 'Amores.' 
In Shakespeare's latest play of 'The Tempest' Prospero's 
recantation of his magic art (v. i. t,^ seq.) — 

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, &c. 

— verbally echoes Medea's incantation when making her 
rejuvenating potion, in the 'Metamorphoses' (vii. 
197 seq.). In his 'Sonnets' too Shakespeare borrows 
from the same Latin poem his chief excursions into 
cosmic and metaphysical philosophy.^ Finally there is 
good reason for believing that the actual copy of Ovid's 
work which the dramatist owned still survives. There 
is in the Bodleian Library an exemplar of the Aldine 

^ In Titus Andronicus, for which Shakespeare's full responsibility is 
questioned, Ovid's Metamorphoses is brought on the stage and from the 
volume the tragic tale of Philomel is read out (iv. i. 42 seq.). Later 
in the play (iv. iii. 4) the Latin words ' terras Astrsea reliquit ' are intro- 
duced from the Metamorphoses, i. 150. An intimate acquaintance with 
Ovid's poem was an universal characteristic of Elizabethan culture. 

2 when in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, sc. ii. 59-61, 
the lord's servant makes allusion, for the benefit of the tinker Sly, to 
Daphne's disdain of Apollo's advances, he paraphrases Ovid's story in 
the Metamorphoses (i. 508-9). Twice Shakespeare makes airy allusion 
to the tale (which Ovid first narrated) of Baucis and Philemon, the 
rustics who entertained Jove unawares {Much Ado, 11. i, 100, and As 
You Like It, II. iii. lo-ii). Many other examples could be given. 

' Cf. the present writer's 'Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets' in Quar- 
terly Review, April 1909, and see pp. 180 seq. infra. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 21 

edition of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (1502), and on the 
title is the signature 'W™. Sh®.,' which experts have de- 
clared — on grounds which deserve attention — to be a 
genuine autograph of the poet.^ 

English renderings of classical poetry and prose were 
growing common in Shakespeare's era. The poetry of 
Virgil and of Ovid, Seneca's tragedies and some ^j^^ ^,g ^^ 
parts of his philosophical work, fragments of transia- 
Homer and Horace, were among the classical ^^°^^' 
writings which were accessible in the vernacular in the 
eighth decade of the sixteenth century. Many of 
Shakespeare's reminiscences of the 'Metamorphoses' 
show indebtedness to the popular English version which 
came in ballad metre from the pen of Arthur Golding 
in 1567. That translation long enjoyed an especially 
wide vogue; a seventh edition was issued in 1597, and 
Golding's phraseology is often reflected in Shakespeare's 
lines. Yet the dramatist never wholly neglected the 
Latin text to which he had been introduced at school. 
Twice does the Latin poet confer on Diana, in her char- 
acter of Goddess of Groves, the name Titania ('Met- 
amorphoses,' iii. 173 and vi. 364). In both cases the 
translator Golding omits this distinctive appellation, 
and calls Diana by her accustomed title. Ovid's Latin 
alone accounts for Shakespeare's designation of his fairy 
queen as Titania, a word of great beauty which he first 
introduced into English poetry. There is no ground for 
ranking* the dramatist with classical scholars or for 
questioning his liberal use of translations. A lack of 
exact scholarship fully accounts for the ' small Latin and 

^ Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1890, pp. 379 seq. The 
volume was purchased for the Bodleian at the sale of a London book- 
seller, William Henry Alkins of Lombard Street, in January 1865. On 
a leaf facing the title-page is an inscription, the genuineness of which is 
unquestioned: 'This little Booke of Ovid was given to me by W Hall 
who sayd it was once Will Shaksperes. T. N. 1682.' The identity of 
'W Hair and 'T. N.' has not been satisfactorily established. The 
authenticity of the Shakespeare signature is ably maintained by Dr. 
F. A. Leo in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakes peare-Gesellschaft, vol. xvi. 
(1880), pp. 367-75 (with photographic illustrations). 



2 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

less Greek' with which he was credited by his scholarly 
friend, Ben Jonson. But Aubrey's report that 'he 
understood Latin pretty well' is incontestable. The 
original speech of Ovid and Seneca lay well within his 
mental grasp. 

Shakespeare's knowledge of French — the language of 
Ronsard and Montaigne — at least equalled his know- 
ledge of Latin. In 'Henry V the dialogue in many 
scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically 
accurate, if not idiomatic. There is, too, no reason to 
doubt that the dramatist possessed sufficient acquaint- 
ance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of 
an Italian poem by Ariosto or Tasso or of a novel by 
Boccaccio or Bandello.^ Hamlet knew that the story of 
Gonzago was ' extant, and written in very choice Italian ' 
(ill. ii. 256). _ 

The books in the English tongue which were accessible 
to Shakespeare in his schooldays, whether few or many, 
TheEng- included the English Bible, which helped to 
lish Bible, mould his budding thought and expression. 
Two versions were generally available in his boy- 
hood — the Genevan version, which was first issued 
in a complete form in 1560, and the Bishops' revision of 
1568, which the Authorised Version of 161 1 closely fol- 
lowed and superseded. The Bishops' Bible was author- 
ised for use in churches. The Genevan version, which 

^ Cf. Spencer Baynes, 'What Shakespeare learnt at School,' in Shake- 
speare Studies, 1894, pp. 147 seq. Henry Ramsay, one of the panegyrists 
of Ben Jonson, in the collection of elegies entitled Jonsonus Virbius 
(1637), wrote of Jonson : 

That Latin he reduced, and could command 

That which your Shakespeare scarce could understand. 

Ramsay here merely echoes Jonson's familiar remarks on Shakespeare's 
'small Latin.' No greater significance attaches to Jasper Mayne's 
vague assurance in his elegy on Jonson (also in Jonsonus Virbius) that 
Jonson's native genius was such that he 

Without Latin helps had been as rare 

As Beaumont, Fletcher, or as Shakespeare were. 

The conjunction of Shakespeare with Beaumont and Fletcher, who were 
well versed in the classics, proves the futility of Mayne's rhapsody. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 23 

was commonly found in schools and middle-class house- 
holds, was clearly the text with which youthful Shake- 
speare was chiefly familiar.^ 

References to scriptural characters and incidents are 
not conspicuous in Shakespeare's plays, but, such as they 
are, they are drawn from all parts of the Bible, g^ake- 
and indicate a general acquaintance with speareand 
the narrative of both Old and New Testa- t^^^i^ie. 
ments. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases 
with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to 
episodes in biblical history. Elizabethan English was 
saturated with scriptural expressions. Many enjoyed 
colloquial currency, and others, which were more rec- 
ondite, were liberally scattered through HoHnshed's 
'Chronicles' and secular works whence the dramatist 
drew his plots. Yet there is a savour of early study about 
his normal use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural 
history. His scriptural reminiscences bear trace of the 
assimilative or receptive tendency of an alert youthful 
mind. It is futile to urge that his knowledge of the 
Bible was mainly the fruit of close and continuous appH- 
cation in adult life.^ 

Games flourished among Elizabethan boys, and Shake- 
speare shows acquaintance in his writings with childish 
pastimes, like 'the whipping of tops,' 'hide Youthful 
and seek,' 'more sacks to the mill,' 'push recreation, 
pin,' and 'nine men's morris.' Touring players vis- 

^ When Shylock speaks of 'your prophet the Nazarite' {Merchant 
of Venice, i. iii. 31), and when Prince Henry speaks of 'a good amend- 
ment of life' (i Hen. IV. i. ii. 106), both the italicised expressions come 
from the Genevan version of the Bible, and are replaced by different 
expressions in other English versions, by the Nazarene in the first case, 
and by repentance in the second. Similar illustrations abound. 

2 Bishop Charles Wordsworth, in his Shakespeare's Knowledge and 
Use of the Bible (4th edit. 1892), gives a long list of passages for which 
Shakespeare may have been indebted to the Bible. But the bishop's 
deductions as to the strength of Shakespeare's adult piety seem strained. 
The Rev. Thomas Carter's Shakespeare and Holy Scripture (1905) is 
open to much the same exceptions as the bishop's volume, but no Shake- 
spearean student will fail to derive profit from examining his exhaustive 
collection of parallel passages. 



24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ited Stratford from time to time during Shakespeare's 
schooldays, and it was a habit of EHzabethan parents in 
provincial towns to take their children with them to local 
performances of stage plays."- The actors made, as we 
have seen, their first appearance at Stratford in 1568, 
while Shakespeare's father was bailiff. The experiment 
was repeated almost annually by various companies 
between the dramatist's ninth and twenty-first years.^ 
Dramatic entertainments may well have ranked among 
Shakespeare's juvenile amusements. There were, too, 
cognate diversions in the neighbourhood of Stratford in 
which the boy may have shared. In July 1575, when 
Shakespeare had reached the age of eleven. Queen Eliza- 
beth made a progress through Warwickshire on a visit 
to her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, at his castle of 
Kenilworth. References have been justly detected in 
Oberon's vision in Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's 
Dream' (11. i. 148-68) to the fantastic pageants, masques, 
and fireworks with which the queen was entertained in 
Kenilworth Park during her stay. Two full and graphic 
descriptions which were published in 1576 in pamphlet 

^ One R. Willis, who was senior to Shakespeare by a year, tells how his 
father took him as a child to see a travelling company's rendering of a 
piece called the Cradle of Security in his native town of Gloucester. 'At 
such a play my father tooke me with him, and made mee stand betweene 
his leggs as he sate upon one of the benches, where wee saw and heard 
very well' — R Willis's Mount Tabor or Private Exercises of a Penitent 
Sinner, published in the yeare of his Age 75, Anno Dom. 1639, pp. 
1 10-3; cf. Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 28-30. 

^ In 1573 Stratford was visited by the Earl of Leicester's men; in 
1576 by the Earl of Warwick's and the Earl of Worcester's men; 
in 1577 by the Earl of Leicester's and the Earl of Worcester's men; in 
1579 by the Lord Strange's and the Countess of Essex's men; in 1580 
by the Earl of Derby's players; in 1581 by the Earl of Worcester's and 
Lord Berkeley's players; in 1582 by the Earl of Worcester's players; 
in 1583 by Lord Berkeley's and Lord Chandos's players; in 1584 by 
players under the respective patronage of the Earl of Oxford, the Earl 
of Warwick, and the Earl of Essex, and in 1586 by an unnamed com- 
pany. As many as five companies — the Queen's, the Earl of Essex's, 
the Earl of Leicester's, Lord Stafford's and another company — visited 
the town in 1587 (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 150-1). Mr. 
F. C. Wellstood, the secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, has kindly 
prepared for me a full transcript of all the references to actors in the 
Chamberlain's accounts in the Stratford-on-Avon archives. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 25 

form, might have given Shakespeare his knowledge of 
the varied programme.^ But Leicester's residence was 
only fifteen miles from Stratford, and the country people 
came in large numbers to witness the open-air festivities. 
It is reasonable to assume that some of the spectators 
were from Stratford and that they included the elder 
Shakespeare and his son. 

In any case Shakespeare's opportunities of recreation, 
whether within or without Stratford, saw some restriction 
as his schooldays drew to an end. His father's 
financial difficulties grew steadily, and they drawai 
caused the boy's removal from school at an ^^°"^^j 
unusually early age. Probably in 1577, when 
he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an 
effort to restore his decaying fortunes. 'I have been 
told heretofore,' wrote Aubrey, 'by some of the neigh- 
bours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's 
trade,' which, according to the writer, was that of a 
butcher. It is possible that John's ill-luck at the period 
compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, 
which in happier days formed only one branch of his 
business. His son may have been formally apprenticed 
to him. An early Stratford tradition describes him as 
'apprenticed to a butcher.''^ 'When he kill'd a calf,' 
Aubrey adds less convincingly, 'he would doe it in a 
high style and make a speech. There was at that time 
another butcher's son in this towne, that was held not 
at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaint- 
ance, and coetanean, but dyed young.' 

At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more 
than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which 
was little calculated to lighten his father's 
anxieties. He married. His wife, according ^amage'^ 
to the inscription on her tombstone, was his 
senior by eight years. Rowe states that she 'was the 

^ See p. 232 infra. 

2 Notes of John Dowdall, a tourist in Warwickshire in 1693 (pub- 
lished in 18^8). 



26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a sub- 
stantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.' 

On September i, 1581, Richard Hathaway, 'husband- 
man' of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old Strat- 
ford, made his will, which was proved on 
Hathaway July 9, 1 58 2, and is now preserved at Somer- 
of Shot- gg|- House. His house and land, ' two and a 

tery. 

half virgates,' had been long held in copyhold 
by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous circum- 
stances. His wife Joan, the chief legatee, was directed 
to carry on the farm with the aid of the eldest son, 
Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was as- 
signed. Six other children — ^ three sons and three daugh- 
ters — received sums of money ; Agnes, the eldest 
daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter, were 
each allotted 6/. 135. 4.d., 'to be paid at the day of her 
marriage,' a phrase common in wills of the period. 
Anne Anne and Agnes were in the sixteenth century 

Hathaway, alternative spellings of the same Christian 
name; and there is little doubt that the daughter 
'Agnes' of Richard Hathaway's will became, within a 
few months of Richard Hathaway's death, Shakespeare's 
wife.^ 

The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hatha- 
way's cottage, and reached from Stratford by field-paths, 
undoubtedly once formed part of Richard Hathaway's 
farmhouse, and, despite numerous alterations and reno- 

^ Thomas Whittington, a shepherd in the service of the Hathaways 
at Shottery, makes in his will dated 1602 mention of Mrs. Anne Shake- 
speare, Mrs. Joan Hathaway [the mother], John Hathaway and William 
Hathaway [the brothers] in such close collocation as to dissipate all 
doubt that Shakespeare's wife was a daughter of the Shottery household 
(see p. 280 infra). Longfellow, the American poet (in his Poems of 
Places, 1877, vol. ii. p. 198), rashly accepting a persistent popular fallacy, 
assigned to Shakespeare a valueless love poem entitled 'Anne Hathaway,' 
which is in four stanzas with the weak punning refrain ' She hath a way, 
Anne Hathaway.' The verses are by Charles Dibdin, the eighteenth- 
century song-writer, and appear in the chief collected editions of his 
songs, as well as in his novel Hannah Hewit; or the Female Crusoe, 1796. 
Dibdin helped Garrick to organise the Stratford jubilee of 1769, and 
the poem may date from that year. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 27 

vations, still preserves the main features of a thatched 
farmhouse of the Elizabethan period.^ The 
house remained in the Hathaway family till Hatha- 
18^8, although the male line became extinct ^^y'^ 

m • cottafiTC 

in 1746. It was purchased in behalf of the 
public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892. 

No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare's ^ 
marriage survives. Although the parish of Stratford 
included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom 
were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent 
on the subject. A local tradition, which seems to have 
come into being during the nineteenth century, assigns 
the ceremony to the neighbouring hamlet or chapelry 
of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish 
registers now exist. But one important piece of docu- 
mentary evidence directly bearing on the poet's matri- 
monial venture is accessible. In the registry of the bishop 
of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant wherein Fulk 
Sandells and John Richardson, responsible 'husbandmen 
of Stratford,' ^ bound themselves in the bishop's con- 
sistory court, on November 28, 1582, in a surety of 40/. 
to free the bishop of all liability should a lawful im- 
pediment — 'by reason of any precontract' [i.e. with a 
third party] or consanguinity — be subsequently 
disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, against'^ 
then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare i^pedi- 
with Anne Hathaway. On the assumption ^^^ ^' 
that no such impediment was known to exist, and 
provided that Anne obtained the consent of her 

^ John Hathaway, a direct descendant of Richard (father of Shake- 
speare's wife) and owner of the house at the end of the seventeenth 
century, commemorated some repairs by inserting a stone in one of the 
chimney stacks which is still conspicuously inscribed 'I. H. 1697.' John 
Hathaway's reparations were clearly superficial. 

^ Both Fulk Sandells and John Richardson were men of substance 
and local repute. Richardson was buried at Stratford on Sept. 19, 1594, 
and Sandells, who was many years his junior, on Oct. 14, 1624. Sandells, 
who attested the post-mortem inventories of the property of several 
neighbours, helped to appraise the estate of Richardson, his fellow- 
bondsman, on Nov. 4, 1594. {Stratford Records, Miscell. Doc. vol. 
V. 32.) 



28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

'friends/ the marriage might proceed 'with once asking 
of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.' 

Bonds of similar purport, although differing in signifi- 
cant details, are extant in all diocesan registries of the 
sixteenth century. They were obtainable on the pay- 
ment of a fee to the bishop's commissary, and had the 
effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while pro- 
tecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible 
breach of canonical law. But they were not common, 
and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble 
position in life of Anne Hathaway and young Shakespeare 
to adopt such cumbrous formahties when there was always 
available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely 
method of marriage by 'thrice asking of the banns.' 
Moreover, the wording of the bond which was drawn be- 
fore Shakespeare's marriage differs in important respects 
from that commonly adopted.^ In other extant examples 
it is usually provided that the marriage shall not take 
place without the consent of the parents or governors of 
both bride and bridegroom. In the case of the marriage 
of an 'infant' bridegroom the formal consent of his 
parents was essential to strictly regular procedure, al- 
though clergymen might be found who were ready to 
shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run 
the risk of solemnising the marriage of an 'infant' with- 
out inquiry as to the parents' consent. The clergyman 
who united Shakespeare in wedlock to Anne Hathaway 
was obviously of this easy temper. Despite the circum- 
stance that Shakespeare's bride was of full age and he 
himself was by nearly three years a minor, the Shake- 
speare bond stipulated merely for the consent of the 
bride's 'friends,' and ignored the bridegroom's parents 
altogether. Nor was this the only irregularity in the 
document. In other pre-matrimonial covenants of the 
kind the name either of the bridegroom himself or of the 

^ These conclusions are drawn from an examination of like documents 
in the Worcester diocesan registry. Many formal declarations of con- 
sent on the part of parents to their .children's marriages are also extant 
there among the sixteenth-century archives. 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 29 

bridegroom's father figures as one of the two sureties, and 
is mentioned first of the two. Had the usual form been 
followed, Shakespeare's father would have been the chief 
party to the transaction in behalf of his 'infant' son. 
But in the Shakespeare bond the sole sureties, Sandells 
and Richardson, were farmers of Shottery, the bride's 
native place. Sandells was a 'supervisor' of the will of 
the bride's father, who there describes him as 'my trustie 
friende and neighbour.' 

The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the 
negotiations preceding Shakespeare's marriage suggests 
the true position of affairs. Sandells and Rich- Birth of a 
ardson, representing the lady's family, doubt- daughter, 
less secured the deed on their own initiative, so that 
Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading 
a step which his intimacy with their friend's daughter 
had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding 
probably took place, without the consent of the bride- 
groom's parents — it may be without their knowledge 
— soon after the signing of the deed. The scene of the 
ceremony was clearly outside the bounds of Stratford 
parish — in an unidentified church of the Worcester 
diocese, the register of which is lost. Within six months 
of the marriage bond — in May 1583 — a daughter was 
born to the poet, and was baptised in the name of 
Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th. 

Shakespeare's apologists have endeavoured to show 
that the public betrothal or formal 'troth- Formal 
plight ' which was at the time a common prelude betrothal 
to a wedding carried with it all the privileges dispense! 
of marriage. But neither Shakespeare's detailed ^'^^• 
description of a betrothal ^ nor of the solemn verbal 
contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the 
contention much support. Moreover, the circum- 

^ Twelfth Night, act v. sc. i. 11. 160-4 '• 

A contract of eternal bond of love, 
Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands, 
Attested by the holy close o£ lips, 
Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings ; 



30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

stances of the case render it highly improbable that 
Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal 
prehminaries of a betrothal. In that ceremony the 
parents of both contracting parties invariably played 
foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the 
assumption that the bridegroom's parents were actors 
in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his 
marriage. 

A difficulty has been imported into the narration of 
the poet's matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his 

identity with one 'William Shakespeare,' to 
pufed^^ whom, according to an entry in the Bishop 
marriage Qf Worcester's register, a license was issued 

on November 27, 1582 (the day before the 
signing of the Hathaway bond) , authorising his marriage 
with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The theory 
that the maiden name of Shakespeare's wife was Whateley 
is quite untenable, and it seems unsafe to assume that the 
bishop's clerk, when making a note of the grant of the 
license in his register, erred so extensively as to write 
' Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton ' for ' Anne Hathaway 
of Shottery.' ^ The husband of Anne Whateley cannot 

And all the ceremony of this compact 

Seal'd in my [i.e. the priest's] function by my testimony. 

In Measure for Measure Claudio's offence is intimacy with the Lady 
Juhet after the contract of betrothal and before the formahty of marriage 
(cf. act I. sc. ii. 1. 155, act iv. sc. i. 1. 73). In As You Like It, iii. ii. 333 
seq., Rosalind points out that the interval between the contract and the 
marriage ceremony, although it might be no more than a week, did not 
allow connubial intimacy : ' Marry, Time trots hard with a young maid 
between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnised. If 
the interim be but a sennight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the 
length of seven years.' 

^ Inaccuracies in the surnames are not uncommon in the Bishop of 
Worcester's register of licenses for the period {e.g. Baker for Barbar, 
Darby for Bradeley, Edgock for Elcock). But no mistake so thorough- 
going as in the Shakespeare entry has been discovered. Mr. , J. W. 
Gray, in his Shakespeare's Marriage (1905), learnedly argues for the 
clerk's error in copying, and deems the Shakespeare- Whateley license to 
be the authorisation for the marriage of the dramatist with Anne Hatha- 
way. He also claims that marriage by license was essential at certain 
seasons of the ecclesiastical year during which marriage by banns was 



CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE 3 1 

reasonably be identified with the poet. He was doubt- 
less another of the numerous William Shakespeares who 
abounded in the diocese of Worcester. Had a license 
for the poet's marriage been secured on November 27, 
it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have 
entered next day into a bond 'against impediments,' 
the execution of which might well have been demanded 
as a preliminary to the grant of a license but was super- 
erogatory after the grant was made. 

prohibited by old canonical regulations. The Shakespeare- Whateley 
license (of November 2 7) might on this showing have been obtained with 
a view to eluding the delay which one of the close seasons — from Ad- 
vent Sunday (November 27-December 3) to eight days after Epiphany 
{i.e. January 14) — ■ interposed to marriage by banns. But it is ques- 
tionable whether the seasonal prohibitions were strictly enforced at the 
end of the sixteenth century, when marriage licenses were limited by 
episcopal rule to persons of substantial estate. In the year 1592 out of 
thirteen marriages (by banns) celebrated at the parish church of Strat- 
ford, as many as three, the parties to all of which were of humble rank, 
took place in the forbidden month of December. There is no means of 
determining who Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton precisely was. No 
registers of the parish for the period are extant. A Whateley family 
resided in Stratford, but there is nothing to show that Anne of Temple 
Grafton was connected with it. It is undoubtedly a strange coincidence 
that two persons, both named William Shakespeare, should on two suc- 
cessive days not only be arranging with the Bishop of Worcester's official 
to marry, but should be involving themselves, whether on their own 
initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive 
forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of con- 
temporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide 
area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees 
of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whateley was 
licensed to marry was probably of the superior station, to which marriage 
by license was deemed appropriate. 



Ill 

THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD 

Anne Hathaway's greater burden of years and the 
likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by 
Husband her friends were not circumstances of happy 
and wife, augury. Although it is dangerous to read 
into Shakespeare's dramatic utterances allusions to his 
personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists 
that a woman should take in marriage an 'elder than 
herself/ ^ and that prenuptial intimacy is productive 
of 'barren hate, sour-ey'd disdain, and discord,' suggests 
a personal interpretation.^ To both these unpromising 
features was added, in the poet's case, the absence of a 
means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years that 
immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic 
ties with impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to 
him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith) ; both were 
baptised on February 2, and were named after their 
father's friends, Hamnet Sadler, and Judith, Sadler's wife. 
Hamnet Sadler, a prosperous tradesman whose brother 
John was twice bailiff, continued a friend for life, rendering 
Shakespeare the last service of witnessing his will. The 

^ Twelfth Night, act 11. sc. iv. 1. 29 : 

Let still the woman take 
An elder than herself ; so wears she to him, 
So sways she level in her husband's heart. 

^ Tempest, act iv. sc. i. 11. 15-22 : 

If thou dost break her virgin knot before 
All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
With full and holy rite be minister'd, 
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall 
To make this contract grow ; but barren hate.. 
Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew 
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
That you shall hate it both. 

32 



THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD 33 

dramatist's firstborn child Susanna was a year and nine 
months old, when the twins were christened. Shake- 
speare had no more children, and all the evidence points 
to the conclusion, that in the later months of the year 
(1585) he left Stratford, and that he fixed his abode in 
London in the course of 1586. Although he was never 
wholly estranged from his family, he seems to have seen . A 
little of wife or children for some eleven years. Between 
the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596 — -an interval 
which synchronises with his first literary triumphs — 
there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Strat- '- 
ford records. On March i, 1586-7, there died Edmund 
Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, 
and a few months later Shakespeare's name, as owner of 
a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and 
mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal 
to confer on Edmund's son and heir, John Lambert, an 
absolute title to the Wilmcote estate on condition of his 
cancelling the mortgage and paying 20I. But the deed 
does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted 
at the transaction.^ 

Shakespeare's early literary work proves that while in 
the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, 
and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs. All 
his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless 
as a youth practised many field sports. Sympathetic 
references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling 
abound in his early plays and poems. ^ There is small 
doubt, too, that his sporting experiences passed at times 
beyond orthodox limits. 

Some practical knowledge of the art of poaching seems 
to be attested by Shakespeare's early Hnes : 

^ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 11-13. 

^ Cf. Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883; J. E. Harting, 
Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1872. The best account of Shakespeare's 
knowledge of sport is given by the Right Hon. D. H. Madden in his 
entertaining and at the same time scholarly Diary of Master William 
Silence: a Study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Sport, 1897 (new edi- 
tion, 1907). 



34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

What ! hast not thou full often struck a dc3 ' 

And borne her cleanly by the keeper's nose? 

Titus Andronicus, ii. i. 92-3. 

A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, 
was the immediate cause of Shakespeare's long severance 
Poaching from his native place. 'He had,' wrote the 
at biographer Rowe in 1709, 'by a misfortune 

Chariecote. (^-qjj^jj^qj^ euough to youug fcllows, fallen into 
ill company ; and, amongst them, some, that made a 
frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with 
them more than once in robbing a park that belonged 
to Sir Thomas Lucy of Chariecote near Stratford.. 
For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he 
thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to re- 
venge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and 
though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be 
lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it 
redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree 
that he was obliged to leave his business and family in 
Warwickshire for some time and shelter himself in Lon- 
don.' The independent testimony of Archdeacon Rich- 
ard Davies, who was vicar of Sapperton, Gloucester- 
shire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect 
that Shakespeare was 'much given to all unluckiness in 
stealing vension and rabbits, particularly from Sir 
Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes 
imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county 
to his great advancement.' The law of Shakespeare's 
day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three 
months' imprisonment and the payment of thrice the 
amount of the damage done. 

The tradition has been challenged on the ground 
that the Chariecote deer-park was of later date than the 
Unwar- sixteenth century. But Sir Thomas Lucy was 
ranted an cxtensivc game-preserver, and owned at 
of the Chariecote a warren in which a few harts or 

tradition, ^q^^ doubtless found an occasional home. 
Samuel Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare 



THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD 35 

stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but from Ful- 
broke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied 
in his 'Views on the Warwickshire Avon,' 1795, an en- 
graving of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, 
where he asserted that Shakespeare was temporarily im- 
prisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel was locally 
known for some years as Shakespeare's 'deer-barn,' but 
no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of 
these buildings (now removed), was Lucy's property in 
Elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was 
solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the 
owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention.^ 

The ballad which Shakespeare is ]:eported to have 
fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as 
Rowe acknowledged, survive. No authenticity justice 
can be allowed the worthless stanza beginning Shallow. 
'A parliament member, a justice of peace,' which was 
represented to be Shakespeare's on the authority of 
Thomas Jones, an old man who lived near Stratford 
and died in 1703, aged upwards of ninety.^ But 
such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a 
distinct impress on Shakespearean drama. Justice 
Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of the owner of 
Charlecote. According to Archdeacon Davies of Sapper- 
ton, Shakespeare's 'revenge was so great that' he carica- 
tured Lucy as 'Justice Clodpate,' who was (Davies adds) 
represented on the stage as ' a great man,' and as bearing, 
in allusion to Lucy's name, 'three louses rampant for 
his arms.' Justice Shallow, Davies's 'Justice Clodpate,' 
came to birth in the 'Second Part of Henry IV' (1597), 
and he is represented in the opening scene of the ' Merry 
Wives of Windsor' as having come from Gloucester- 
shire to Windsor to make a Star-Chamber matter of a 

^ Cf. C. Holte Bracebridge, Shakespeare no Deerstealer, 1862; Lock- 
hart, Life of Scott, vii. 123. 

2 Copies of the lines which were said to have been taken down from 
the old man's lips belonged to both Edward Capell and William Oldys 
(cf. Yeowell's Memoir of Oldys, 1862, p. 44). A long amplification, 
clearly of later date, is in Malone, Variorum, ii. 138, 563. 



36 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

poaching raid on his estate. 'Three luces hauriant 
argent' were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys. 
A 'luce' was a full-grown pike, and the meaning of the 
word fully explains Falstaff's contemptuous mention of 
the garrulous country justice as ' the old pike ' (' 2 Henry 
IV,' III. ii. 323).^ The temptation punningly to confuse 
' luce ' and ' louse ' was irresistible, and the dramatist's pro- 
longed reference in the ' Merry Wives ' to the ' dozen white 
luces' on Justice Shallow's 'old coat' fully estabhshes 
Shallow's identity with Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. 
The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but 
it may- be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing 
The flight ^^*^"^ Lucy's persecution, at once sought an 
from asylum in London. William Beeston, a seven- 

trat or . tecnth-ccntury actor, remembered hearing that 
he had been for a time a country schoolmaster 'in his 
younger years,' and it seems possible that on first leaving 
Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbour- 
ing village. The suggestion that he joined, at the end 
of 1585, a band of youths of the district in serving in the 
Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of 
Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based 
on an obvious confusion between him and others of his 
name and county.^ The knowledge of a soldier's life 
which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater 
and no less than that which he displayed of almost all 
other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he 
wrote of all or of any from practical experience, unless 
the direct evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his 
intuitive power of realising life under almost every aspect 
by force of his imagination. 

^ It is curious to note that William Lucy (1594-1677), grandson of 
Shakespeare's Sir Thomas Lucy, who became Bishop of St. David's, 
adopted the pseudonym of William Pike in his two volumes (1657-8) 
of hostile 'observations' on Hobbes's Leviathan. 

^ Cf. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 1865, pp. 16 seq. 
Sir Philip Sidney, writing from Utrecht on March 24, 1585-6, to his 
father-in-law. Sir Francis Walsingham, mentioned 'I wrote to yow 
a letter by Will, my lord of Lester's jesting plaier' (Lodge's Portraits, 
ii. 176). The messenger was the well-known actor Will Kempe, and 
not, as has been rashly suggested, Shakespeare. 



IV 

THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 

Amid the clouds which gathered about him in his native 
place during 1585, Shakespeare's hopes turned towards 
London, where high-spirited youths of the xhe jour- 
day were wont to seek their fortune from all ney to 
parts of the country. It was doubtless in the °° °^' 
early summer of 1586 that Shakespeare first traversed 
the road to the capital. There was much intercourse 
at the time between London and Stratford-on-Avon. 
Tradesmen of the town paid the great city repeated visits 
on legal or other business ; many of their sons swelled the 
ranks of the apprentices; a few were students at the 
Inns of Court.^ A packhorse carrier, bearing his load 

^ Three students of the Middle Temple towards the end of the six- 
teenth century were natives of Stratford, viz. William, second son of 
John Combe, admitted on October 19, 1571 ; Richard, second son of 
Richard Woodward (born on March 11, 1578-9), on November 25, 1597 ; 
and William, son and heir of Thomas Combe, and grandnephew of his 
elder namesake, on October 7, 1602 {Middle Temple Records, i. 181, 380, 
425). For names of Stratford apprentices in the publishing trade of 
London see p. 40 n. 2 infra. There is a remarkable recorded instance of 
a Stratford boy going on his own account and unbefriended to London 
to seek mercantile employment and making for himself a fortune and 
high position in trade there. The lad, named John Sadler, belonged 
to Shakespeare's social circle at Stratford. Born there on February 24, 
1586-7, the son of John Sadler, a substantial townsman who was twice 
bailiff in 1599 and 161 2, and nephew of the dramatist's friend Hamnet 
Sadler, the youth, early in the seventeenth century, in order to escape 
a marriage for which he had a distaste, suddenly (according to his 
daughter's subsequent testimony) 'joined himself to the carrier [on a 
good horse which was supplied him by his friends] and came to London, 
where he had never been before, and sold his horse in Smithfield ; and 
having no acquaintance in London to recommend or assist him, he went 
from street to street and house to house, asking if they wanted an ap- 
prentice, and though he met with" many discouraging scorns and a thou- 
sand denials, he went till he light on Mr. Brooksbank, a grocer in Buck- 

37 



38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

in panniers, made the journey at regular intervals, and 
a solitary traveller on horseback was wont to seek the 
carrier^s protection and society.^ Horses could be hired 
at cheap rates. But walking was the common mode of 
travel for men of small means, and Shakespeare's first 
journey to London may well have been made on foot.^ 

lersbury.' The story of Sadler's journey to London and his first em- 
ployment there is told in his daughter's autobiography, The Holy Life 
of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, late wife of A[ntony] W[alker] D.D. (1690). 
Sadler's fortunes in London progressed uninterruptedly. He became 
one of the chief grocers or druggists of the day, and left a large estate, 
including property in Virginia, on his death in 1658. His shop was at 
the Red Lion in Bucklersbury — the chief trading quarter for men of 
his occupation. Shakespeare in Merry Wives, iii. iii. 62, writes of fops 
who smelt 'like Bucklersbury in simple time' — a reference to the dried 
herbs which the grocers stocked in their shops there. A Stratford neigh- 
bour, Richard Quiney, Sadler's junior by eight months, became his 
partner, and married his sister (on August 27, 1618) ; Quiney died in 
1655. Sadler and Quiney jointly presented to the Corporation of Strat- 
ford on August 22, 1632, 'two fayre gilte maces,' which are still in use 
(cf. French's Shakes peareana Gencalogica, pp. 560 seq.), and they also 
together made over to the town a sum of 150/. 'to be lent out, the in- 
crease [i.e. interest] to be given the poor of the borough for ever' (Wheler's 
History of Stratford, p. 88). Shakespeare was on intimate terms with 
both the Sadler and Quiney families. Richard Quiney's father (of the 
same names) was a correspondent of the dramatist (see p. 294 infra), 
and his brother Thomas married the dramatist's younger daughter, 
Judith (see p. 462 infra). 

^ Shakespeare graphically portrays packhorse carriers of the time in 
I Henry IV. 11. i. i seq. 

^ Stage coaches were unknown before the middle of the seventeenth 
century, although at a little earlier date carriers from the large towns 
began to employ wagons for the accommodation of passengers as well 
as merchandise. Elizabethan men of letters were usually good pedes- 
trians. In 1570 Richard Hooker, the eminent theologian, journeyed 
as an undergraduate on foot from Oxford to Exeter, his native place. 
Izaak Walton, Hooker's biographer, suggests that, for scholars, walking 
'was then either more in fashion, or want of money or their humility 
made it so.' On the road Hooker visited at Salisbury Bishop Jewel, 
who lent him a walking staff with which the bishop 'professed he had 
travelled through many parts of Germany' (Walton's Lives, ed. BuUen, 
p. 173). Later in the century John Stow, the antiquary, travelled 
through the country 'on foot' to make researches in the cathedral towns 
(Stow's Annals, 1615, ed. Howes). In 1609 Thomas Coryat claimed to 
have walked in five months 1975 miles on the continent of Europe. In 
1618 Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson walked from London to Edin- 
burgh and much of the way back. In the same year John Taylor, the 
water-poet, also walked independently from London to Edinburgh, and 
thence to Braemar (see his Penny les Pilgrimage, 161 8). 



THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 39 

There were two main routes by which London was 
approached from Stratford, one passing through Oxford 
and High Wycombe, and the other through Alternative 
Banbury and Aylesbury.^ The distance either '■o^^tes. 
way was some 120 miles. Tradition points to the 
Oxford and High Wycombe road as Shakespeare's 
favoured thoroughfare. The seventeenth-century anti- 
quary, Aubrey, asserts on good authority that at Grendon 
Underwood, a village near Oxford, 'he happened to 
take the humour of the constable in "Midsummer 
Night's Dream" ' — by which the writer meant, we may 
suppose, 'Much Ado about Nothing.' There were 
watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and 
probably at Stratford itself. But a specially blustering 
specimen of the class may have arrested Shakespeare's 
attention while he was moving about the Oxfordshire 
countryside. The Crown Inn (formerly 3 Cornmarket 
Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as 
one of the dramatist's favourite resting places on his 
journeys to and from the metropolis. With the Oxford 
innkeeper John Davenant and with his family Shake- 
speare formed a close intimacy. In 1605 he stood god- 
father to the son WilHam who subsequently as Sir 
William D'Avenant enjoyed the reputation of a popular 
playwright.^ 

The two roads which were at the traveller's choice 
between Stratford and London became one within twelve 
miles of the city's walls. All Stratford wayfarers met 
at Uxbridge, thenceforth to follow a single path. Much 
desolate country intervened between Uxbridge and their 
destination. The most conspicuous landmark was 'the 
triple tree' of Tyburn (near the present Marble Arch) 
— the triangular gallows where London's felons met their 
doom. The long Uxbridge Road (a portion of which is 
now christened Oxford Street) knew few habitations until 
the detached village of St. Giles came in view. Beyond 

^ Cf. J. W. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1-24. 
2 See p. 449 infra. 



40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

St. Giles, the posts and chains of Holborn Bars marked 
(Hke Temple Bar in the Strand) London's extramural or 
suburban limit, but the full tide of city life was first joined 
at the archway of Newgate. It was there that Shake- 
speare caught his first glimpse of the goal of his youthful 
ambition.^ 

The population of London nearly doubled during 
Shakespeare's lifetime, rising from 100,000 at the begin- 
stratford mug of Queen Elizabeth's reign to 200,000 in 
settlers. i\^q course of her successor's. On all sides 
the capital was spreading beyond its old decaying 
walls, so as to provide homes for rural immigrants. 
Already in 1586 there were in London settlers from 
Stratford to offer Shakespeare a welcome. It is specially 
worthy of note that shortly before his arrival, three young 
men had come thence to be bound apprentice to London 
printers, a comparatively new occupation with which the 
development of literature was closely allied. With one 
of these men, Richard Field, Shakespeptre was soon in 
close relations, and was receiving from him useful aid 
and encouragement.^ 

^ The traveller on horseback by either route spent two nights oh the 
road and reached Uxbridge on the third day. The pedestrian would 
spend three nights, arriving at Uxbridge on the fourth day. Several 
'bills of charges' incurred by citizens of Stratford in riding to and from 
London during Shakespeare's early days are extant among the Eliza- 
bethan manuscripts at Shakespeare's Birthplace. The Banbury route 
was rather more frequented than the Oxford Road; it seems to have 
been richer in village inns. Among the smaller places on this route at 
which the Stratford travellers found good accommodation were Stretton 
Audley, Chenies, Wendover, and Amersham (see Mr. Richard Savage's 
'Abstracts from Stratford Travellers' Accounts' in AthencBum, Sep- 
tember 5, 1908). 

2 Of the two other stationer's apprentices from Stratford, Roger, son 
of John Locke, glover, of Stratford-on-Avon, was apprenticed on August 
24, 1577, for ten years to William Pickering (Arber, Transcripts of Regis- 
ters of the Stationers^ Company, ii. 80), and Allan, son of Thomas Orrian, 
tailor, of Stratford, was bound apprentice on March 25, 1585, for seven 
years to Thomas Fowkes {ihid. ii. 132). Nothing further seems known 
of Roger Locke. Allan Orrian was made free of the Stationers' Com- 
pany on October 16, 1598 {ibid. ii. 722). No information is accessible 
regarding his precise work as stationer, but he was prosperous in business 
for some seven years, in the course of which there were bound to him 



THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 4 1 

Field's London career offers illuminating parallels with 
that of Shakespeare at many practical points. Born at 
Stratford in the same year as the dramatist, Rkhard 
he was a son of Henry Field, a fairly pros- ^i^''^- 
perous tanner, who was a near neighbour of Shake- 
speare's father. The elder Field died in 1592, when 
the poet's father, in accordance with custom, attested 
'a trew and perfecte inventory' of his goods and chattels. 
On September 25, 1579, at the usual age of fifteen, 
Richard was apprenticed to a London printer and sta- 
tioner of repute, George Bishop, but it was arranged five 
weeks later that he should serve the first six years of his 
articles with a more interesting member of the printing 
fraternity, Thomas Vautrollier, a Frenchman of wide 
sympathies and independent views. Vautrollier had 
come to London as a Huguenot refugee and had estab- 
lished his position there by publishing in 1579 Sir Thomas 
North's renowned translation of 'Plutarch's Lives' — a 
book in which Shakespeare was before long to be well 
versed. When the dramatist reached London, Vau- 
trolher was at Edinburgh in temporary retirement owing 
to threats of prosecution for printing a book by the 
Italian sceptic Giordano Bruno. His Stratford ap- 
prentice benefited by his misfortune. With the aid of 
his master's wife. Field carried on the business in Vau- 
trollier's absence, and thenceforth his advance was 
rapid and secure. Admitted a freeman of the Stationers' 
Company on February 6, 1586-7, he soon afterwards 
mourned his master's death and married his widow. 
Vautrollier's old premises in Blackfriars near Ludgate 
became his property,^ and there until the century closed 
he engaged in many notable ventures. These included 

seven apprentices, all youths from country districts. The latest notice 
of Orrian in the Stationers' Register is dated October 15, 1605, when 
he was fined 'i2d for nonappearance on the quarter day' {ibid. ii. 840). 
In one entry in the Stationers' Register his name appears as 'Allan 
Orrian alias Currance' {ibid. ii. 243). 

^ About 1600 Field removed from Blackfriars to the Sign of the 
Splayed Eagle in the parish of St. Michael in Wood Street. 



42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

a new edition of North's translation of 'Plutarch' 
(1595) and the first edition of Sir John Harington's 
translation of Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso' (1591).^ 

Field long maintained good relations with his family 
at Stratford, and on February 7, 159 1-2, he sent for his 
Field and younger brother Jasper, to serve him as appren- 
Shake- tice. In the early spring of the following year 
speare. j^^ gave signal proof of his intimacy with his 
fellowtownsman Shakespeare by printing his poem 
'Venus and Adonis,' the earliest specimen of Shake- 
speare's writing which was committed to the press. Next 
year Field performed a like service for the poem 'Lucrece,' 
Shakespeare's second publication. The metropolitan 
prosperity of the two Stratford settlers was by that time 
assured, each in his own sphere. Some proof of defective 
sympathy with Shakespeare's ambitions may lurk in the 
fact that Field was one of the inhabitants of Blackfriars 
who signed in 1596 a peevish protest against the plan of 
James Burbage, Shakespeare's theatrical colleague, to 
convert into a 'common playhouse' a Blackfriars dwell- 
ing-house.^ Yet, however different the aspirations of the 
two men, it was of good omen for Shakespeare to meet 
on his settlement in London a young fellow-townsman 
whose career was already showing that country breeding 
proved no bar to civic place and power.^ Finally Field 
rose to the head of his profession, twice filling the high 
office of Master of the Stationers' Company. He sur- 
vived the dramatist by seven years, dying in 1623. 

In the absence of strictly contemporary and categorical 
information as to how Shakespeare employed his time 
on arriving in the metropolis, much ingenuity has been 
wasted in irrelevant speculation. The theory that Field 

^ A friendly note of typographical directions from Sir John Harington 
to Field is extant in an autograph copy of Harington's translation of 
Orlando Furioso (B.M. MSB. Addit. 18920, f. 336). The terms of the 
note suggest very amiable relations between Field and his authors. 
(Information kindly supplied by Mr. H. F. B. Brett-Smith.) 

2 Mrs. Stopes's Burbage and Shakespeare's Stage, 1913, pp. 174-5. 

^ See Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in facsimile, edited by Sidney 
Lee, Oxford, 1905, pp. 39 seq. 



THE MIGRATION TO LONDON 43 

found work for him in Vautrollier's printing office is 
an airy fancy which needs no refutation. shake- 
Little more can be said in behalf of the speare's 
attempt to prove that he sought his early kgaUx- 
livelihood as a lawyer's clerk. In spite of the pe"ence. 
marks of favour which have been showered on this 
conjecture, it fails to survive careful scrutiny. The 
assumption rests on no foundation save the circum- 
stance that Shakespeare frequently employed legal 
phraseology in his plays and poems. ^ A long series of 
law terms and of metaphors which are drawn from legal 
processes figure there, and it is argued that so miscel- 
laneous a store of legal information could only have been 
acquired by one who was engaged at one time or another 
in professional practice. The conclusion is drawn from 
fallacious premises. Shakespeare's legal knowledge is a 
mingled skein of accuracy and inaccuracy, and the errors 
are far too numerous and important to justify on sober 
inquiry the plea of technical experience. No judicious 
reader of the 'Merchant of Venice' or 'Measure for 
Measure' can fail to detect a radical unsoundness in 
Shakespeare's interpretation alike of elementary legal 
principles and of legal procedure. 

Moreover the legal terms which Shakespeare favoured 
were common forms of speech among contem- -phe liter- 
porary men of letters and are not peculiar to his a-ry habit 
literary or poetic vocabulary. Legal phrase- phrase- 
ology in Shakespeare's vein was widely dis- °^°sy- 
tributed over the dramatic and poetic literature of his 

^ Lord Campbell, who greatly exaggerated Shakespeare's legal know- 
ledge in his Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements (1859), was the first writer 
to insist on Shakespeare's personal connection with the law. Many 
subsequent writers have been misled by Lord Campbell's book (see 
Appendix II). The true state of the case is presented by Charles Allen 
in his Notes on the Bacon Shakespeare Question (Boston, 1900, pp. 22 
seq.) and by Mr. J. M. Robertson in his Baconian Heresy (1913, pp. 31 
seq.). Mr. Allen's chapter (ch. vii) on 'Bad Law in Shakespeare' is 
especially noteworthy. Of the modish affectation of legal terminology 
by contemporary poets some instances are given below in Barnabe 
Barnes's Sonnets, 1593, and in the collection of sonnets called Zepheria, 
1594 (see Appendix ix). 



44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

day. Spenser in his 'Faerie Queene' makes as free 
as Shakespeare with strange and recondite technical 
terms of law. The dramatists Ben Jonson, Mas- 
singer, and Webster use legal words and phrases and 
describe legal processes with all the great dramatist's 
frequency and facility, and on the whole with fewer 
blunders.^ It is beyond question that all these writers 
lacked a legal training. Elizabethan authors' common 
habit of legal phraseology is indeed attributable to 
causes in which professional experience finds no pace. 
Throughout the period of Shakespeare's working career, 
there was an active social intercourse between men of 
letters and young lawyers, and the poets and dramatists 
caught some accents of their legal companions' talk. 
Litigation at the same time engaged in an unprecedented 
degree the interests of the middle classes among Eliza- 
beth's and James I's subjects. Shakespeare's father and 
his neighbours were personally involved in endless legal 
suits the terminology of which became household words 
among them. Shakespeare's liberal employment of law 
terms is merely a sign on the one hand of his habitual 
readiness to identify himself with popular literary 
fashions of the day, and, on the other hand, of his general 
quickness of apprehension, which assimilated suggestion 
from every phase of the life that was passing around him. 
It may be safely accepted that from his first arrival in 
London until his final departure Shakespeare's mental 
energy was absorbed by his poetic and dramatic ambi- 
tions. He had no time to devote to a technical or pro- 
fessional training in another sphere of activity. 

^ When in All's Well Bertram is ordered under compulsion by the 
king his guardian to wed Helena, Shakespeare ignores the perfectly 
good plea of 'disparagement' which was always available to protect a 
ward of rank from forced marriage with a plebeian. Ben Jonson proved 
to be more alive to Bertram's legal privilege. In his Bartholomew Fair 
(act III. sc. i.) Grace Wellborn, a female ward who is on the point of 
being married by her guardian against her will, is appropriately advised 
to have recourse to the legal ' device of disparagement.' For Webster's 
liberal use of law terms see an interesting paper ' Webster and the Law : 
a Parallel,' by L. J. Sturge in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1906, xlii. 148-57. 



V 

SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 

Teadition and commonsense alike point to the stage 
as an early scene of Shakespeare's occupation in London. 
Sir William D'Avenant, the dramatist, who was 
ten years old when Shakespeare died and was theatrical 
an eager collector of Shakespearean gossip, is employ- 
credited with the story that the dramatist was 
originally employed at ' the playhouse ' in ' taking care of 
the gentlemen's horses who came to the play,' and that 
he so prospered in this humble vocation as to organise 
a horse-tending service of 'Shakespeare's boys.' The 
pedigree of the story is fully recorded. D'Avenant con- 
fided the tale to Thomas Betterton, the great actor of 
the Restoration, who shared Sir William's zeal for 
amassing Shakespearean lore. By Betterton the legend 
was handed on to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first 
biographer, who told it to Pope. But neither Rowe nor 
Pope published it. The report was first committed to 
print avowedly on D'Avenant's and Betterton's authority 
in Theophilus Gibber's 'Lives of the Poets' (i. 130) 
which were published in 1 753.^ Only two regular theatres 
('The Theatre' and the 'Curtain') were working in 
London at the date of Shakespeare's arrival. Both were 
situate outside the city walls, beyond Bishopsgate; 
fields lay around them, and they were often reached on 
horseback by visitors. According to the Elizabethan 
poet Sir John Davies, in his 'Epigrammes,' No. 7 (1598), 

^ Commonly assigned to Theophilus Gibber, they were written by 
Robert Shiels, an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson, and other hack-writers 
under Gibber's editorial direction. 

45 



46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the well-to-do citizen habitually rode 'into the fields' 
when he was bent on playgoing.^ The owner of 'The 
Theatre,' James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smith- 
field. There is no inherent- improbability in the main 
drift of D'Avenant's strange tale, which Dr. Johnson 
fathered in his edition of Shakespeare in 1765. 

No doubt is permissible that Shakespeare was speedily 
offered employment inside the playhouse. According 
to Rowe's vague statement, 'he was received into the 
company then in being at first in a very mean rank.' 
William Castle,^ parish clerk of Stratford through great 
part of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling 
visitors that the dramatist entered the playhouse as 'a 
servitor.' In 1780 Malone recorded a stage tradition 
' that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter's 
attendant,' or call boy. Evidence abounds to show that 
his intellectual capacity and the amiability with which 
he turned to account his versatile powers were soon 
recognised, and that his promotion to more dignified 
employment was rapid. 

Shakespeare's earliest reputation was made as an actor, 
and, although his work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his 
rpj^g histrionic fame, he remained a prominent 

player's member of the actor's profession till near the 
end of his life. The profession, when Shake- 
speare joined it, was in its infancy, but while he was a 
boy ParHament had made it on easy conditions a lawful 
and an honourable calling. By an Act of ParHament of 
1571 (14 EKz. cap. 2) which was re-enacted in 1596 
(39 Eliz. cap. 4) an obligation was imposed on players 
of procuring a license for the exercise of their function 

^ So, too, Thomas Dekker in his Gids Hornbook, 1609 (ch. v. 'How 
a young Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary'), describes how 
French lacqueys and Irish footboys were wont to wait ' with their mas- 
ters' hobby horses' outside the doors of ordinaries for the gentlemen 
'to ride to the new play; that's the rendezvous, thither they are galloped 
in post.' Only playhouses north of the Thames were thus reached. To 
theatres south of the river the usual approach was by boat. 

2 Castle's family was of old standing at Stratford, where he was born 
on July 19, 1614, and died in 1701 ; see Dowdall's letter, pp. 641-2 infra. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 47 

from a peer of the realm or ' other honourable personage 
of greater degree.' In the absence of such credential 
they were pronounced to be of the status of rogues, 
vagabonds, or sturdy beggars, and to be liable to humili- 
ating punishments ; but the hcense gave them the un- 
questioned rank of respectable citizens. Elizabethan 
peers hberally exercised their Hcensing powers, and the 
Queen gave her subjects' activity much practical en- 
couragement. The services of hcensed players were con- 
stantly requisitioned by the Court to provide dramatic 
entertainment there. Those who wished to become actors 
found indeed little difficulty in obtaining a statutory 
license under the hand and seal of persons in high station, 
who enrolled them by virtue of a formal fiction among 
their 'servants,' became surety for their behaviour and 
relieved them of all risk of derogatory usage.^ An early 
statute of King James's reign (i Jac. cap. 7) sought in 
1603 to check an admitted abuse whereby the idle para- 
sites of a magnate's household were wont to plead his 
' license ' by way of exemption from the penalties of va- 
grancy or disorder. But the new statute failed seriously 
to menace the actors' privileges.^ Private persons may 

^ The conditions attaching in Shakespeare's time to the grant of an 
actor's license may be deduced from the earliest known document re- 
lating to the matter. In 1572 six 'players,' who claimed to be among 
the Earl of Leicester's retainers, appealed to the Earl in view of the 
new statute of the previous year 'to reteyne us at this present as your 
houshold Servaunts and daylie wayters, not that we meane to crave 
any further stipend or benefite at your Lordshippes handes but our 
Lyveries as we have had, and also your honors License to certifye that 
we are your houshold Servaunts when we shall have occasion to travayle 
amongst our frendes' (printed from the Marquis of Bath's MSS., in 
Malone Soc. Coll. i. 348-9). The licensed actor's certificate was an im- 
portant asset; towards the end of Shakespeare's life there are a few 
cases of fraudulent sale by a holder to" an unauthorised person or of 
distribution of forged duplicates by an unprincipled actor who aimed at 
forming a company of his own. But the regulation of the profession 
was soon strict enough to guard against any widespread abuse (Dr. C. 
W. Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. 385, and Murray, English Dramatic 
Companies, ii. 320, 343 seq.) 

^ Under this new statute proceedings were sanctioned against sus- 
pected rogues or vagrants notwithstanding any 'authority' which 
should be 'given or made by any baron of this realm or any other hon- 



48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

have proved less ready, in view of the greater stringency 
of the law, to exercise the right of licensing players, but 
there was a compensating extension of the range of the 
royal patronage. The new King excelled his predecessor 
in enthusiasm for the drama. He acknowledged by 
letters patent the full corporate rights of the leading 
compan}^, and other companies of repute were soon 
admitted under like formalities into the 'service' of his 
Queen and of his two elder sons, as well as of his daugh- 
ter and son-in-law. The actor's calling escaped challenge 
of legality, nor did it suffer legal disparagement, at any 
period of Shakespeare's epoch. ^ 

From the middle years of the sixteenth century many 
hundreds of men received licenses to act from noblemen 
The acting and Other persons of social position, and the 
companies, hcensees formed themselves into companies of 
players which enjoyed under the statute of 1571 the 
standing of lawful corporations. Fully a hundred peers 
and knights during Shakespeare's youth bestowed the 
requisite legal recognition on bands of actors who were 
each known as the patron's 'men' or 'servants' and 
wore his 'livery' with his badge on their sleeves. The 
fortunes of these companies varied. Lack of public 
favour led to financial diihculty and to periodic suspen- 
sion of their careers, or even to complete disbandment. 
Many companies confined their energies to the provinces 
or they only visited the capital on rare occasions in order 

ourable personage of greater degree unto any other person or persons.' 
The clauses which provided 'houses of correction' for the punishment 
of vagrants were separately re-enacted in a stronger form six years 
later (7 Jac. cap. 4) ; all reference to magnates' licensed 'servants' was 
there omitted. 

^ Shakespeare's acquaintance, Thomas Heywood, the well-known 
actor and dramatist, in his Apology for Actors, 16 12, asserts of the actors' 
profession (Sh. Soc. p. 4): 'It hath beene esteemed by the best and 
greatest. To omit all the noble patrons of the former world, I need 
alledge no more then the royall and princely services in which we now 
live.' Towards the end of his tract Heywood after describing the es- 
timation in which actors were held abroad adds (p. 60) : ' But in no 
country they are of that eminence that ours are : so our most royall 
and ever renouned soveraigne hath licenced us in London : so did his 
predecessor, the thrice vertuous virgin, Queene Elizabeth.' 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 49 

to perform at Court at the summons of the Sovereign, 
who wished to pay a compHment to their titled master. 
Yet there were powerful influences making for perma- 
nence in the infant profession, and when Shakespeare 
arrived in London there were at work there at least 
seven companies, whose activities, in spite of vicissi- 
tudes, were continuous during a long course of years. 
The leading companies each consisted on the average of 
some twelve active members, the majority of whom were 
men, and the rest youths or boys, for no women found 
admission to the actors' ranks and the boys filled the 
female parts.^ Now and then two companies would com- 
bine, or a prosperous company would absorb an unsuc- 
cessful one, or an individual actor would transfer his 
services from one company to another ; but the great 
companies formed as a rule independent and organic 
units, and the personal constitution only saw the gradual 
changes which the passage of years made inevitable. 
Shakespeare, like most of the notable actors of the epoch, 
remained through his working days faithful to the same 
set of colleagues.^ 

Of the well-established companies of licensed actors 
which enjoyed a reputation in London and the provinces 
when Shakespeare left his native place, three The great 
were under the respective patronage of the patrons. 
Earls of Leicester, of Pembroke,^ and of Worcester, while 

^ As many as twenty-six actors are named in the full list of members 
of Shakespeare's company which is prefixed to the First Folio of 1623, 
but at that date ten of these wt "e dead, and three or four others had 
retired from active work. 

2 The best account of the history and organisation of the companies 
is given in John Tucker Murray's English Dramatic Companies, 1558- 
1642, 2 vols. London, 1910. Fleay's History of the Stage, which also 
collects valuable information on the theme, is full of conjectural asser- 
tion, much of which Mr. Murray corrects. 

' This theatrical patron was Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pem- 
broke, the father of William Herbert, the third Earl, who is well known 
to Shakespearean students (see infra, pp. 164, 682-9). The Pembroke 
company broke up on the second Earl's death on January 19, 1601, and 
it was not till some years after Shakespeare's death that an Earl of 
Pembroke again fathered a company of players. 



50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

a fourth ' served ' the Lord Admiral Lord Charles Howard 
of Effingham. These patrons or Hcensers were all peers 
of prominence at Queen Elizabeth's Court, and a noted 
band of actors bore one or other of their names.^ 

The fifth association of players which enjoyed general 
repute derived its hcense from Queen Elizabeth and was 
called the Queen's company.^ This troop of actors was 
first formed in 1583 of twelve leading players who were 
drawn from other companies. After being 'sworn the 
Queen's servants' they 'were allowed wages and liveries 
as grooms of the chamber.' ^ The company's career, in 
spite of its auspicious inauguration, was chequered ; it 
ceased to perform at Court after 1591 and was irregular 
in its appearances at the London theatres after 1594; 
but it was exceptionally active on provincial tours until 
the Queen's death. 

In the absence of women actors the histrionic vocation 
was deemed especially well adapted to the capacity of 
The com- boys, and two additional companies, which 
panics of were formed exclusively of boy actors, were 
°-^^" in the enjoyment of licenses from the Crown. 

They were recruited from the choristers of St. Paul's 
Cathedral and the Chapel Royal. The youthful per- 
formers, whose dramatic programmes resembled those 
of their seniors, acquired much popularity and proved 
formidable competitors with the men. The rivalry 
knew little pause during Shakespeare's professional life. 

The adult companies changed their name when a 

^ The companies of the Earls of Sussex and of Oxford should not be 
reckoned among the chief companies; they very rarely gave public 
performances in London; nor in the, country were they continuously 
employed. The Earl of Oxford's company, which was constituted 
mainly of boys, occupied the first Blackfriars theatre in 1582-4, but 
was only seen publicly again in London in the two years 1587 and 1602 ; 
in the latter year it disappeared altogether. 

^ A body of men was known uninterruptedly by the title of the Queen's 
Players from the opening years of Henry VIII's reign ; but no marked 
prestige attached to the designation until the formation of the new 
Queen's company of 1583. 

^ Stow's Chronicle, ed. Howes {sub anno 1583). 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 5 1 

new patron succeeded on the death or the retirement of 
his predecessor. Alterations of the companies' titleg 
were consequently frequent, and introduce The for- 
some perplexity in the history of their several tunes of 
careers. But there is good reason to believe Leicester's 
that the band of players which first fired company. 
Shakespeare's histrionic ambitions was the one which 
long enjoyed the patronage of Queen Ehzabeth's 
favourite, the Earl of Leicester, and subsequently under 
a variety of designations filled the paramount place in 
the theatrical annals of the era. 

At the opening of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the Earl of 
Leicester, who was known as Lord Robert Dudley before 
the creation of the earldom in 1564, numbered among 
his household retainers, men who provided the house- 
hold with rough dramatic or musical entertainment. 
Early in 1572 six of these men applied to the Earl for 
a license in conformity with the statute of 15 71, and 
thus the earliest company of licensed players was 
created.^ The histrionic organization made rapid prog- 
ress. In 1574 Lord Leicester's company which then 
consisted of no more than five players inaugurated an- 
other precedent by receiving the grant of a patent of 
incorporation under the privy seal. Two years later 
James Burbage, whose name heads the list of Lord 
Leicester's 'men' in the primordial charters of the stage, 
built in the near neighbourhood of London the first 
English playhouse, which was known as 'The Theatre.' 
The company's numbers grew quickly and in spite of 
secessions which tem.porarily deprived them both of 
their home at ' The Theatre ' and of the services of James 
Burbage, Lord Leicester's players long maintained a 
coherent organisation. They acted for the last time at 
Court on Dec. 27, 1586,^ but were busy in the provinces 

^ See p. 47, n. i. The names run, James Burbage, John Perkin, 
John Laneham, William Johnson, Robert Wilson and Thomas Clarke. 
Thomas Clarke's name was omitted from the patent of 1574. 

^ Cf. E. K. Chambers's ' Court Performances before Queen Eliza- 
beth' in Modern Language Review, vol. ii. p. 9. 



52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

until their great patron's death on September 4, 1588. 
Then with Kttle delay the more prominent members 
joined forces with a less conspicuous troop of actors who 
were under the patronage of a highly cultured nobleman 
Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, son and heir of the 
fourth Earl of Derby. Lord Leicester's company was 
merged in that of Lord Strange to whose Hterary sym- 
pathies the poet Edmund Spenser bore witness, and when 
the new patron's father died on September 25, 1593, the 
company again changed its title to that of the Earl 
of Derby's servants. The new Earl lived less than seven 
months longer, dying on April 16, 1594,^ and, though 
for the following month the company christened itself 
after his widow 'the Countess of Derby's players,' it 
found in June a more influential and more constant 
patron in Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, who held 
(from 1585) the office of Lord Chamberlain. 

Lord Hunsdon had already interested himself modestly 
in theatrical affairs. For some twelve previous years 
his protection was extended to players of humble fame, 
some of whom were mere acrobats.^ The Earl of Sussex, 
too, Hunsdon's predecessor in the post of Lord Chamber- 
lain (1572-1583), had at an even earlier period lent his 
name to a small company of actors, and, while their 
patron held office at Court, Lord Sussex's men occa- 

^ The 5th Earl of Derby was celebrated under the name 'Amyntas' 
in Spenser's Colin Clout'' s Come Home Again (c. 1594). His brother and 
successor, WilHam Stanley, 6th Earl, on succeeding to the earldom, 
appears to have taken under his protection a few actors, but his com- 
pany won no repute and its operations which lasted from 1594 to 1607 . 
were confined to the provinces. Like many other noblemen, the sixth 
Earl of Derby was deeply interested in the drama and would seem to 
have essayed playwriting. See p. 232 infra. 

2 During 1584 an unnamed person vaguely described as 'owner' of 
'The' Theatre' claimed that he was under Lord Hunsdon's protection. 
The reference is probably to one John Hyde to whom the building was 
then mortgaged by James Burbage rather than to Burbage himself. 
Lord Hunsdon's men were probably performing at the house in the 
absence of Leicester's company. Cf. Malone Society's Collections, 
vol. i. p. 166; Dr. C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre (Nebraska 
University Studies), 1913, p. 12; Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 53 

sionally adopted the alternative title of the Lord 
Chamberlain's servants.' ^ But the association of the 
Lord Chamberlain with the stage acquired genuine 
importance in theatrical history only in 1594 when Lord 
Hunsdon re-created his company by enrolHng with a 
few older dependents the men who had won their pro- 
fessional spurs as successive retainers of the Earls of 
Leicester and Derby. James Burbage now rejoined old 
associates, while his son Richard, who, unlike his father, 
had worked with Lord Derby's men, shed all the radiance 
of his matured genius on the Lord Chamberlain's new 
and far-famed organisation.^ The subsequent stages in 
the company's pedigree are readily traced. There were 
no further graftings or reconstitution. When the Lord 
Chamberlain died on July 23, 1596, his son and heir, 
George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, accepted his 
histrionic responsibilities, and he, after a brief interval, 
himself became Lord Chamberlain (in March 1597). 
On February 19, 1597-8, the Privy Council bore witness to 
the growing repute of 'The Lord Chamberlain's men' by 
making the announcement (which proved complimentary 
rather than operative) that that company and the Lord 
Admiral's company were the only two bands of players 
whose license strictly entitled them to perform plays any- 
where about London or before Her Majesty's Court.^ 

^ Malone Society's Collections, vol. i. pp. 36-7 ; Malone's Variorum 
Shakespeare (1821), iii. 406. 

2 Besides Richard Burbage the following actors, according to extant 
lists of the two companies, passed in 1594 from the service of the Earl 
of Derby (formerly Lord Strange) to that of the Lord Chamberlain 
(Lord Hunsdon), viz. : WiUiam Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, 
Augustine Phillips, George Bryan, Harry Condell, Will Sly, Richard 
Cowley, John Duke, Christopher Beeston. Save the two last, all these 
actors are named in the First Folio among 'the principal actors' in 
Shakespeare's plays ; they follow immediately Shakespeare and Richard 
Burbage who head the First FoHo list. William Kemp, Thomas Pope, 
and George Bryan were at an earlier period prominent among Lord 
Leicester's servants. The continuity of the company's personnel through 
all the changes of patronage is well attested. (Fleay's History of the 
Stage, pp. 82-85, 13s, 189.) 

^ Acts of the Privy Council, new series, vol. xxviii. 1597-1598 (1904), 
p. 327; see p. 338 infra. 



54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The company underwent no further change of name 
until the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. A more signal 
recognition awaited it when King James ascended the 
throne in 1603. The new King took the company into 
The King's his own patronage, and it became known as 
servants. 'The King's' or 'His Majesty's' players. 
Thus advanced in titular dignity, the company re- 
mained true to its well-seasoned traditions during the 
rest of Shakespeare's career and through the generation 
beyond. 

There is little doubt that at an early period Shake- 
speare joined this eminent company of actors which in 

Shake- ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ favour of King James, 
speare's From 1 592, some six years after the drama- 
company, ^jg^'g arrival in London, until the close of his 
professional career more than twenty years later, such 
an association is well attested. But the precise date 
and circumstance of his enrolment and his initial promo- 
tions are matters of conjecture. Most of his colleagues 
of latter life opened their histrionic careers in Lord 
Leicester's professional service, and there is plausible 
ground for inferring that Shakespeare from the first trod 
in their footsteps.^ But direct information is lacking. 
Lord Leicester, who owned the manor of Kenilworth, 
was a Warwickshire magnate, and his players twice 
visited Stratford in Shakespeare's boyhood, for the first 
time in 1573 and for the second in 1577. Shakespeare 
may well have cherished hopes of admission to Lord 
Leicester's company in early youth. A third visit was 
paid by Leicester's company or its leading members to 

^ Richard Burbage and John Heminges, leading actors of the com- 
pany while it was known successively as Lord Derby's and the Lord 
Chamberlain's 'men,' were close friends of Shakespeare from early 
years, but the common assumption that they were natives of Stratford 
is erroneous. Richard Burbage was probably born in Shoreditch (Lon- 
don) and John Heminges at Droit wich in Worcestershire. Thomas 
Green, a popular comic actor at the Red Bull theatre until his death in 
161 2, is conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds that 
deserve attention. Shakespeare is not known to have been associated 
with him in any way. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 55 

Shakespeare's native town in 1587, a year in which as 
many as four other companies also brought Stratford 
within the range of their provincial activities. But by 
that date the dramatist, according to tradition, was 
already in London. Lord Leicester's 'servants' gave a 
farewell performance at Court at Christmas 1586,^ and 
early in 1587 the greater number of them left London 
for a prolonged country tour. James Burbage had tem- 
porarily seceded and was managing 'The Theatre' in 
other interests and with the aid of a few only of his former 
colleagues. The legend which connects Shakespeare's 
earliest theatrical experience exclusively with Burbage's 
playhouse therefore presumes that he associated himself 
near the outset of his career with a small contingent of 
Lord Leicester's 'servants' and did not share the adven- 
tures of the main body. 

Shakespeare's later theatrical fortunes are on record. 
In 1589, after Lord Leicester's death, his company was 
reorganised, and it regained under the aegis His ties 
of Lord Strange its London prestige. With with the 
Lord Strange 's men Shakespeare was closely chamber- 
associated as dramatic author. He helped in lam's men. 
the authorship of the First Part of 'Henry VI,' 
with which Lord Strange's men scored a triumphant 
success early in 1592. When in 1594 that company 
(then renamed the Earl of Derby's men) was merged 
in the far-famed Lord Chamberlain's company, 
Shakespeare is proclaimed by contemporary official 
documents to have been one of its foremost members. 
In December of that year he joined its two leaders, 
Richard Burbage the tragedian and William Kemp the 

^ Lord Leicester's men are included among the players whose activities 
in London during Shakespeare's iirst winter there (1586-7) are thus 
described in an unsigned letter to Sir Francis Walsingham under date 
Jan. 25, 1586-7: 'Every day in the weeke the playeres billes are sett 
upp in sondry places of the cittie, some in the name of her Majesties 
menne, some the Earle of Leic : some the E. of Oxfordes, the Lo. Ad- 
myralles, and dyvers others, so that when the belles tole to the lectoures, 
the trumpettes sounde to the stages.' (Brit. Mus. Harl. MS. 286; 
Halliwell-Phillipps, Illustrations, 1874, p. 108.) 



56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

comedian, in two performances at Court.' He was 
prominent in the counsels of the Lord Chamberlain's 
servants through 1598 and was recognised as one of their 
chieftains in 1603. Four of the leading members of the 
Lord Chamberlain's company — Richard Burbage, John 
Hcminges, Henry Condell and Augustine Phillips, all of 
whom worked together under Lord Strange (Earl 
of Derby) — were among his lifelong friends. Similarly 
under this company's auspices, almost all of Shake- 
speare's thirty-seven plays were presented to the 
public.^ • Only two of the dramas claimed for him — 
'Titus Andronicus' and 'The True Tragedie of Richard 
Duke of Yorke,' a first draft of '3 Henry VI' — are 
positively known to have been performed by other 
bands of players. The 'True Tragedie' was, accord- 
ing to the title-page of the pubhshed version of 1595, 
' sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle 
of Pembroke his servants,' while 'Titus Andronicus' 
is stated on the title-page of the first edition of 1594 to 
have been 'plaide' not only by the company of 'the 
Right Honourable the Earle of Derbie,' but in addition 
by the servants of both 'the Earle of Pembroke and 
Earle of Sussex.' ^ Shakespeare was responsible for 
fragments only of these two pieces, and the main authors 

^ See p. 87. 

- On tlie title-pages of thirteen plays which were published (in quarto) 
in Shakespeare's lifetime it was stated that they had been acted by this 
company under one or other of its four successive designations (the Earl 
of Derby's, the Lord Chamberlain's, Lord Hunsdon's, or the King's 
servants). The First Folio of 1623, which collected all Shakespeare's 
plays, was put togetlaer by Shakespeare's fellow actors Heminges and 
Condell, who claimed ownership in them as having been written for their 
company. 

^ The second edition of Titus Andronicus (1600) adds 'the Lord 
Chamberlain's servants'; but the Earl of Derb}'' and the Lord Cham- 
berlain were as we have seen successive patrons of Shakespeare's com- 
pany. Lord Pembroke's servants in 1593-4 were in financial straits, 
and sold some of their plays to Shakespeare's and other companies. 
Titus was produced as a 'new play' by Lord Sussex's men at the Rose 
Theatre on January 2^, 1593-4 (cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 78, 
105) ; it may have been sold to them by the Pembroke company after 
an abortive attempt at representation. 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE ACTORS 57 

would seem to have been attached to other companies, 
which, after having originally produced them, trans- 
ferred them to Shakespeare's colleagues. It is alone 
with the company which began its career under the pro- 
tection of Lord Leicester and ended it under royal 
patronage that Shakespeare's dramatic activities were 
conspicuously or durably identified. 



VI 

ON THE LONDON STAGE 

'The Theatre,' the playhouse at Shoreditch, where 
Shakespeare is credibly reported to have gained his first 
The first experience of the stage, was a timber structure 
playhouse which had been erected in 1576. Its builder 
m England. ^^^ proprietor James Burbage, an original 
member of Lord Leicester's company, was at one time 
a humble carpenter and joiner, and he carried out his 
great design on borrowed capital. The site, which had 
once formed part of the precincts of the Benedictine 
priory (or convent) of Holywell, lay outside the city's 
north-eastern boundaries, and within the jurisdiction 
not of the Lord Mayor and City Council which viewed 
the nascent drama with puritanic disfavour, but of the 
justices of the peace for Middlesex, who had not com- 
mitted themselves to an attitude of hostility. The 
building stood a few feet to the east of the thoroughfare 
now known as Curtain Road, Shoreditch, and near at 
hand was the open tract of land variously known as 
Finsbury Fields and Moorfields.^ 'The Theatre' was 
the first house erected in England to serve a theatri- 
cal purpose. Previously plays had been publicly per- 
formed in innyards or (outside London) in Guildhalls. 
More select representations were given in the halls of 

^ The precise site of ' The Theatre ' has been lately determined by- 
Mr. W. W. Braines, a principal officer of the London County Council. 
(See London County Council — Indication of Houses of Historical 
Interest in London — Part xliii. Holywell Priory and the site of The 
Theatre, Shoreditch, 1915.) Mr. Braines corrects errors on the subject 
for which Halliwell-Phillipps {Outlines, i. 351) was responsible. 

58 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 59 

royal palaces, of noblemen's mansions and of the Inns 
of Court. Throughout Shakespeare's career all such 
places continued to serve theatrical uses. Drama never 
ceased altogether in his time to haunt innyards and the 
other makeshift scenes of its infancy to which the public 
at large were admitted on payment ; there was a growth, 
too, in the practice of presenting plays before invited 
guests in great halls of private ownership. But James 
Burbage's primal endeavour to give the drama a home 
of its own quickly bore abundant fruit. Puritanism 
launched vain invectives against Burbage's 'ungodly 
edifice ' as a menace to public morality. City Councillors 
at the instigation of Puritan preachers made futile en- 
deavours to close its doors. Burbage's innovation prom- 
ised the developing drama an advantage which was 
appreciated by the upper classes and by the mass of 
the people outside the Puritan influence. The growth 
of the seed which he sowed was Httle hindered by the 
clamour of an unsympathetic piety. The habit of play- 
going spread rapidly, and the older and more promis- 
cuous arrangements for popular dramatic recreation 
gradually yielded to the formidable competition which 
flowed from the energy of Burbage and his disciples. 

James Burbage, in spite of a long series of pecuniary 
embarrassments, remained manager and owner of 'The 
Theatre' for nearly twenty-one years. Shortly "The 
after the building was opened, in 1576, there Curtain." 
came into being in its near neighbourhood a second 
London playhouse, the 'Curtain,'^ also within a 
short distance of Finsbury Fields or Moorfields, and 
near the present Curtain Road, Shoreditch, which pre- 
serves its name. The two playhouses proved friendly 
rivals, and for a few years (i 585-1 592) James Burbage 
of 'The Theatre' shared in the management of the 
younger house at the same time as he controlled the 
older. Towards the close of the century Shakespeare 

^ The name was derived from an adjacent ' curtain ' or outer wall of 
an obsolete fortification abutting on the old London Wall. 



6o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

spent at least one season at the Curtain.^ But between 
1586 and 1600 there arose in the environs of London six 
new theatres in addition to 'The Theatre' and the 
'Curtain,' and within the city walls the courtyards 
of the larger inns served with a new vigour theatrical 
purposes. Actors thus enjoyed a fairly wide choice of 
professional homes when Shakespeare's career was in 
full fiight.2 

When Shakespeare and his colleagues first came under 
the protection of Lord Strange, they were faithful to 
Shake- 'The Theatre' save for an occasional perform- 
speare at ^ auce in the innyard of the ' Crosskeys ' in 
t e ose. Gracechurch Street,^ but there soon followed 
a prolonged season at a playhouse called the ' Rose,' 

^ After 1600 the vogue of the 'Curtain' declined. No reference to 
the 'Curtain' playhouse has been found later than 1627. 

2 The chief of the Elizabethan playhouses apart from 'The Theatre' 
and the 'Curtain' were the Newington Butts (erected before 1586); 
the Rose on the Bankside (erected about 1587 and reconstructed in 
1592); the Swan also on the Bankside (erected in 1595); the Globe 
also on the Bankside (erected out of the dismantled fabric of 'The 
Theatre ' in 1 599) ; the Fortune in Golden Lane without Cripplegate 
(modelled on the Globe in 1600) ; and the Red Bull in St. John's Street, 
Clerkenwell (built about 1600). Besides these edifices which were un- 
roofed there were two smaller theatres of a more luxurious and secluded 
type — 'Paul's' and ' Blackf riars ' — which were known as 'private' 
houses (see p. 67 infra). At the same time there were several inns, 
in the quadrangular yards or courts of which plays continued to be 
acted from time to time in Shakespeare's early years; these were the 
Bel Sauvage in Ludgate Hill, the Bell and the Crosskeys both in Grace- 
church Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate, and the Boar's Head in East- 
cheap. During the latter part of Shakespeare's life only one addition 
was made to the public theatres, viz. the Hope in 1613 on the site of the 
demolished Paris Garden, in South wark, but two new 'private' theatres 
were constructed — the Whitefriars, adjoining Dorset Gardens, Fleet 
Street (built before 1608), and the Cockpit, afterwards rechristened the 
Phoenix (built about 1610), the first playhouse in Drury Lane. See 
Henslowe's Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, 1904; W: J. Lawrence's The Eliza- 
bethan Playhouse and other Studies, 2nd ser. p. 237 ; James Greenstreet's 
'Lawsuit about the Whitefriars Theatre in 1609' in New Shakspere 
Society's Transactions, 1887-92, pp. 269 seq., and Dr. Wallace's Three 
London Theatres of Shakespeare^ s Time, in Nebraska University Studies, 
1909, ix. pp. 287 seq., his Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars (1597- 
1603), 1908, and his paper 'The Swan Theatre and the Earl of Pem- 
broke's Servants' in Englische Studien (1910-1) xliii. 350 sq. 

* Hazlitt's English Drama, 1869, pp. 34-5. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 6 1 

which PhiHp Henslowe, the speculative theatrical 
manager, had lately reconstructed on the Bankside, 
Southwark. It was the earliest playhouse in a district 
which was soon to be specially identified with the drama. 
Lord Strange's men began work at the 'Rose' on Feb- 
ruary 19, 1 59 1-2. At the date of their occupation of 
this theatre, Shakespeare's company temporarily allied 
itself with the Lord Admiral's men, which v/as its chief 
rival among the companies of the day. The Lord Ad- 
miral's players numbered the great actor Edward Alleyn 
among them.^ Alleyn now for a few months took the 
direction at the ' Rose ' of the combined companies, but 
the two bodies quickly parted, and no later opportunity 
was offered Shakespeare of enjoying professional rela- 
tions with Alleyn. The 'Rose' theatre was the first 
scene of Shakespeare's pronounced successes alike as 
actor and dramatist. 

Subsequently, during the theatrical season of 1594, 
Shakespeare and his company, now known as the Lord 
Chamberlain's men, divided their energies between the 
stage of another youthful theatre at Newington Butts 
and the older-fashioned innyard of the 'Crosskeys.' 
The next three years were chiefly spent in their early 
Shoreditch home 'The Theatre,' which had been occu- 
pied in their absence by other companies. But during 
1598, owing to 'The Theatre's' structural decay and to 
the manager Burbage's difficulties with his creditors 
and with the ground landlord, the company found a 
brief asylum in the neighbouring 'Curtain,' in which 
more than one fellow-actor of the dramatist acquired a 
proprietary interest.^ There 'Romeo and Juliet' was 
revived with applause.^ This was Shakespeare's last 

^ Alleyn and the Lord Admiral's men had previously worked for a 
time with James Burbage at 'The Theatre,' and Alleyn's company 
joined the older Lord Chamberlain's company in a performance at 
Court, January 6, 1585-6. (Halliwell's Illustrations, 31.) 

'^ See Thomas Pope's and John Underwood's wills in Collier's Lives 
of the Actors, pp. 127, 230. 

^ Marston's Scourge of Villanie, 1598, Satyre 10. 



62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

experience for some twelve years of a playhouse on the 
north side of the Thames. The theatrical quarter of 
London was rapidly shifting from the north to the south 
of the river. 

At the close of 1598 the primal EngHsh playhouse 
'The Theatre' underwent a drastic metamorphosis in 
which the dramatist played a foremost part. James 
Burbage, the owner and builder of the veteran house, 
died on Februar}^ 2, 1596-7, and the control of the prop- 
erty passed to his widow and his two sons Cuthbert 
and the actor Richard. The latter, Shakespeare's 
life-long friend, was nearing the zenith of his renown. 
The twenty-one years' lease of the land in Shoreditch 
ran out on April 13 following and the landlord was reluc- 
tant to grant the Burbages a renewal of the tenancy.^ 
Prolonged negotiation failed to yield a settlement. 
Thereupon Cuthbert Burbage, the elder son and heir, 
in conjunction with his younger brother Richard, took 
the heroic resolve of demoHshing the building and trans- 
ferring it bodily to ground to be rented across the Thames. 
Shakespeare and four other members of the company, 
Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, and 
Wi-Uiam Kemp, were taken by the Burbages into their 
counsel. The seven men proceeded jointly to lease 
for a term of thirty-one years a site on the Bankside 
in Southwark. The fabric of 'The Theatre' was accord- 
ingly torn down in defiance of the landlord during the last 
days of December 1598 and the timber materials were 
re-erected, with liberal reinforcements, on the new site 

^ James Burbage, throughout his tenure of 'The Theatre," was in- 
volved in very complicated litigation arising out of the terms of the 
original lease of the ground and of the conditions in which money was 
invested in the venture by various relatives and others. The numerous 
legal records are in the Public Record Office. A few were found there 
and were printed by J. P. Collier in his Memoirs of the Principal Actors 
in the Plays of Shakespeare (1846), pp. 7 seq., and these reappear with 
substantial additions in Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shake- 
speare (i. 357 seq.). Dr. Wallace's researches have yielded a mass of 
supplementary documents which were previously unknown, and he has 
printed the whole in The First London Theatre, Materials for a History, 
Nebraska University Studies, 1913. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 63 

between January and May 1599.^ The transplanted 
building was christened 'The Globe,' and it quickly 
entered on an era of prosperity which was 
without precedent in theatrical annals. 'The ingof'the ' 
Glory of the Bank [i.e. the Bankside],' as Ben Globe, 
Jonson called 'The Globe,' was, like 'The 
Theatre,' mainly constructed of wood. A portion 
only was roofed, and that was covered with thatch. 
The exterior, according to the only extant contem- 
porary view, was circular, and resembled a magni- 
fied martello tower .^ In the opening chorus of 'Henry 
V Shakespeare would seem to have written of the 
theatre as 'this cockpit' (line 11), and 'this wooden O' 
(line 13), and to have likened its walls to a girdle about 
the stage (line 19).^ Legal instruments credited Shake- 
speare with playing a principal role in the many complex 
transactions of which the ' Globe' theatre was the f ruit.^ 

^ Giles Allen, the ground landlord of 'The Theatre,' brought an 
action against Peter Street, the carpenter who superintended the removal 
of the fabric to Southwark, but after a long litigation the plaintiff was 
nonsuited. 

2 See Hondius's 'View of London 1610' in Halliwell-Phillipps's Out- 
lines, i. 182. The original theatre was burnt down on June 29, 1613, 
and was rebuilt 'in a far fairer manner than before' (see pp. 445-7 infra). 
Visscher, in his well-known View of London 1616, depicts the new struc- 
ture as of octagonal or polygonal shape. The new building was de- 
mohshed on April 16, 1644, and the site occupied by small tenements. 

" The prologue to The Merry Devil of Edmonton acted at the Globe 
before 1607 has the line : 

We ring this round with our invoking spells. 

* See p. 301 infra. The Globe Theatre abutted on Maid Lane (now 
known as Park Street), a modest thoroughfare in Southwark running 
some way behind Bankside on the river bank and parallel with it. There 
is difficulty in determining whether the theatre stood on the north or 
the south side of the roadway, the north side backing on to Bankside 
and the south side stretching landwards. At a short distance to the 
south of Maid Lane there long ran a passage (now closed), which was 
christened after the theatre Globe Alley. A commemorative tablet 
was placed in 1909 on the south side of the street on the outer wall of 
Messrs. Barclay and Perkins's brewery, which formerly belonged to 
Henry Thrale, Dr. Johnson's friend, and has for 150 years been locally 
identified with the site of the theatre. The southern site is indeed power- 
fully supported by a mass of legal evidence, by plans and maps, and by 
local tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (See Dr. 



64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

With yet another memorable London theatre — the 
Blackfriars — Shakespeare's fortunes were intimately 
The bound, though only through the closing years 

Blackfriars. gf ^-^jg professional life. The precise circum- 
stances and duration of his connexion with this 
playhouse have often been misrepresented. In origin 
the Blackfriars was only a Httle younger than 'The 
Theatre,' but it differed widely in structure and saw 
many changes of fortune in the course of years. As 
early as 1578 a spacious suite of rooms in a dwelling- 
house within the precincts of the dissolved monastery 
of Blackfriars was converted into a theatre of modest 
appointment. For six years the Blackfriars playhouse 
enjoyed a prosperous career. But its doors were closed 
in 1584, and for some dozen years the building resumed 
its former status of a private dwelling. In 1596 James 
Burbage, the founder of 'The Theatre,' ambitious to 
extend his theatrical enterprise in spite of the attendant 
anxieties, purchased for 600/. the premises which had 
given Blackfriars a fleeting theatrical fame together \vith 
adjacent property, and at a large outlay fashioned his 
purchase afresh into a playhouse on an exceptionally 
luxurious plan.^ It was no more than half the size of the 

William Martin's exhaustive and fully illustrated paper on 'The Site 
of the Globe Playhouse' in Surrey Archceological Collections, vol. xxiii. 
(1910), pp. 148-202.) But it must be admitted that Dr. Wallace brought 
to light in 1909 a legal document in the theatrical lawsuit, Osteler v. 
Heminges, 1616 (Pro Coram Rege, 1454, 13 Jac. i, Hil. m. 692), which, 
according to the obvious interpretation of the words, allots the theatre 
to the north side of Maid Lane (see Shakespeare in London, The Times, 
October 2 and 4, 1909). Further evidence (dating between 1593 and 
1606), which was adduced by Dr. Wallace in 1914 from the Records of 
the Sewers Commissioners, shows that the owners of the playhouse owned 
property on the north side even if the theatre were on the south side 
(see The Times, April 30, 1914), while Visscher's panoramic map of 
London 1616 alone of maps of the time would appear to place the theatre 
on the north side. It seems barely possible to reconcile the conflicting 
evidence. The controversy has lately been continued in Notes and 
Queries (nth series, xi. and xii.) chiefly by Mr. George Hubbard, who 
champions anew the northern site, and by Dr. Martin who strongly 
supports afresh the southern site. 

^ Halliwell-Phillipps, in his Outlines (i. 299), printed the deed of the 
transfer of the Blackfriars property to James Burbage on Feb. 4, 1595-6 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 65 

Globe, but was its superior in comfort and equipment. 
Unhappily the new scheme met an unexpected check. 
The neighbours protested against the restoration of the 
Blackfriars stage, and its re-opening was postponed. 
The adventurous owner died amid the controversy (on 
February 2, 1596-7), bequeathing his remodelled theatre 
to his son Richard Burbage. Richard declined for the 
time personal charge of his father's scheme, and he 
arranged for the occupation of the Blackfriars by the 
efficient company of young actors known as the Chil- 
dren of the Chapel Royal. ^ On September 21, 1600, 
he formally leased the house for twenty-one years to 
Henry Evans who was the Children's manager. For 
the next five seasons the Children's performances at 
Blackfriars rivalled in popularity those at the Globe it- 
self. Queen Elizabeth proved an active patron of the 
boys of the Blackfriars, inviting them to perform at 
Court twice in the winters of 1601 and of 1602.^ When 

(cf. Malone Soc. Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. 60-9). Much further light on 
the history of the Blackfriars theatre has been shed by the documents 
discovered by Prof. Albert Feuillerat and cited in his 'The Origin of 
Shakespeare's Blackfriars Theatre : Recent Discovery of Documents,' 
in the Shakespeare Jahrbiich, vol. xlviii. (191 2), pp. 81-102, and in his 
'Blackfriars Records' in Malone Society's Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. (1913). 
Dr. Wallace also brought together much documentary material in his 
Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 159 7-1 603 (1908), and in his 'Shake- 
speare in London' {The Times, Oct. 2 and 4, 1909). The Blackfriars 
theatre was on the site of The Times publishing office off Queen Victoria 
Street. Its memory survives in the passage called Playhouse Yard, 
which adjoins The Times premises. 

^ Evans was lessee and general manager of the theatre and instructed 
the Children in acting. Nathaniel Giles, a competent musical composer, 
who became ' Master of the Children of the Chapel ' under a patent dated 
July 15, 1597, was their music master. (Fleay, Hist, of Stage, 126 seq.) 
When, at Michaelmas 1600, Evans took, in 'confederacy' with Giles, 
a lease of the Blackfriars theatre from Burbage for twenty-one years at 
an annual rental of 40/. in the interest of the Children's performances 
the building was described in the instrument as 'then or late' in Evans's 
'tenure or occupation.' These words are quite capable of the inter- 
pretation that the 'Children' were working at the Blackfriars under 
Giles and Evans some years before Evans took his long lease (but cf. 
E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 156). 

^Murray, i. 335; E. K. Chambers, Mod. Lang. Rev. ii. 12. Sir 
Dudley Carleton, the Court gossip, wrote on Dec. 29, 1601, that the 
Queen dined that day privately at my Lord Chamberlain's {i.e. Lord 



66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

James I ascended the throne they were admitted to the 
service of Queen Anne of Denmark and rechristened 
'Children of the Queen's Revels' (Jan. 13, 1603-4.) 
But the youthful actors were of insolent demeanour and 
often produced plays which offended the Court's poKtical 
susceptibihties.^ In 1605 the company was peremptorily 
dissolved by order of the Privy Council. Evans's lease 
of the theatre was unexpired but no rent was forth- 
coming, and Richard Burbage as owner recovered posses- 
sion on August 9, 1608.^ After an interval, in January 
1610, the great actor assumed full control of his father's 
chequered venture, and Shakespeare thenceforth figured 
prominently in its affairs. Thus for the last six years 
of Shakespeare's life his company maintained two Lon- 
don playhouses, the Blackfriars as well as the Glol^e. 
The summer season was spent on the Bankside and the 
winter at Blackfriars.^ 

Hunsdon's). He adds 'I came even now from the Blackfriars where I 
saw her at the play with aU her candidae auditrices.' {Cal. State Papers 
Dom. 1601-3, p. 136; Wallace, Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 
p. 95.) The last words have been assumed to mean that the Queen 
visited the Blackfriars theatre. There is no other instance of her appear- 
ance in a playhouse. The house of the Queen's host, Lord Hunsdon, lay 
in the precincts of Blackfriars and the reference is probably to a dramatic 
entertainment which he provided for his royal guest under his own roof. 
A dramatic entertainment after dinner was not uncommon at Hunsdon 
House. On March 6, 1599-1600, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon 'feasted' 
the Flemish envoy Verreiken 'and there in the afternoone his Plaiers 
acted before [his guest] Sir John Oldcastell to his great contentment' 
{Sydney Papers, ii. 175). Queen Henrietta Maria seems to be the first 
English Sovereign of whose visit to a theatre there is no question. Her 
presence in the Blackfriars theatre on May 13, 1634, is fuUy attested 
{yariorum Shakespeare, iii. 167). 
^ See p. 306 infra. 

2 The 'Children' were rehabihtated in 1608, and Burbage allowed 
them to act at the Blackfriars theatre at intervals till January 4, 1609-10. 
Beaumont and Fletcher's Scornful Lady was the last piece which they 
produced there. They then removed to the Whitefriars theatre. Two 
years later they were dissolved altogether, the chief members of the 
troop being drafted into adult companies. 

3 This arrangement continued long after Shakespeare's death — until 
Sept. 2, 1642, when all theatres were closed by order of the Long Parlia- 
ment. The Blackfriars was pulled down on August 5, 1655, and, as in 
the case of the Globe Theatre which was demolished eleven years earlier, 
tenements were erected on its site. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 67 

The divergences in the structure of the two houses 
rendered their usage appropriate at different seasons of 
the year. A ' pubHc ' or ' common ' theatre like ^j^^ 
the Globe had no roof over the arena. The 'private' 
Blackfriars, which was known as a 'private' ^^^ °^^^" 
theatre, better observed conditions of privacy or seclu- 
sion in the auditorium, and made fuller provision for the 
comfort of the spectators. It was as well roofed as a 
private residence and it was lighted by candles.^ At the 
private theatre properties, costumes, and music were 
more elaborately contrived than at the public theatre. 
But the same dramatic fare was furnished at both kinds 
of playhouse. Each filled an identical part in the drama's 
literary history. 

It was not only to the London public which frequented 
the theatres that the professional actor of Shakespeare's 
epoch addressed his efforts. Beyond the perform- 
theatres lay a superior domain in which the ancesat 
professional actor of Shakespeare's day con- °^^^' 
stantly practised his art with conspicuous advantage 
both to his reputation and to his purse. Every winter 
and occasionally at other seasons of the year the well- 
established companies gave, at the royal palaces which 
ringed London, dramatic performances in the presence 
of the Sovereign and the Court. The pieces acted at 
Elizabeth's Court were officially classified as 'morals, 
pastorals, stories, histories, tragedies, comedies, inter- 
ludes, inventions, and antic plays.' During Shake- 
speare's youth, masques or pageants in which scenic 
device, music, dancing, and costume overshadowed the 
spoken word, filled a large place in the royal programme. 

^ The 'private' type of theatre, to which the Blackfriars gave assured 
vogue, was inaugurated in a playhouse which was formed in 1581 out of 
the singing school at St. Paul's Cathedral near the Convocation House 
for the acting company of the cathedral choristers; this building was 
commonly called 'Paul's.' Its theatrical use by St. Paul's boys was 
suspended between 1590 and 1600 and finally ceased in 1606 when the 
manager of the rival company of the 'chapel' boys at the Blackfriars 
bribed the manager of the St. Paul's company to close his doors. Cf. 
E. K. Chambers, Mod. Lang. Review, 1909, p. 153 seq. 



68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Such performances were never excluded from the Court 
festivities, and in the reign of King James I were often 
undertaken by amateurs, who were drawn from the 
courtiers, both men and women. But full-fledged stage 
plays which were only capable of professional presenta- 
tion signally encroached on spectacular entertainment. 
Throughout Shakespeare's career the chief companies 
made a steadily increasing contribution to the recrea- 
tions of the palace, and the largest share of the coveted 
work fell in his later years to the dramatist and his col- 
leagues. The boy companies were always encouraged 
by the Sovereign, and they long vied with their seniors 
in supplying the histrionic demands of royalty. But 
Shakespeare's company ultimately outstripped at Court 
the popularity even of the boys. 

The theatrical season at Court invariably opened on 
the day after Christmas, St. Stephen's Day (Dec. 26), 
and performances were usually continued on the succeed- 
ing St. John's Day (Dec. 27), on Innocents' Day (Dec. 
28), on the next Sunday, and on Twelfth Night (Jan. 6). 
The dramatic celebrations were sometimes resumed on 
Candlemas day (Feb. 2), and always on Shrove Sunday 
or Shrove Tuesday. Under King James, Hallowmas 
(Nov. i) and additional days in November and at Shrove- 
tide were also similarly distinguished, and at other periods 
of the year, when royal hospitalities were extended to 
distinguished foreign guests, a dramatic entertainment 
by professional players was commonly provided. A dif- 
ferent play was staged at each performance, so that in 
some years there were produced at Court as many as 
twenty-three separate pieces. The dramas which the 
Sovereign witnessed were seldom written for the occa- 
sion. They had already won the public ear in the 
theatre. A special prologue and epilogue were usually 
prepared for the performances at Court, but in other 
respects the royal productions were faithful to the popu- 
lar fare. The Court therefore enjoyed ample oppor- 
tunity of familiarising itself with the pubHc taste. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 69 

Queen Elizabeth sojourned by turns at her many 
palaces about London. Christmas was variously spent 
at Hampton Court, Whitehall, Windsor, and Greenwich. 
At other seasons she occupied royal residences, which 
have long since vanished, at Nonsuch, near Cheam, and 
at Richmond, Surrey. James I acquired an additional 
residence in Theobalds Palace at Cheshunt in Hertford- 
shire. To all these places, from time to time, Shakespeare 
and his fellow-players were warmly welcomed. A tem- 
porary stage was set up for their use in the great hall of 
each royal dweUing, and numerous artificers, painters, 
carpenters, wiredrawers, armourers, cutlers, plumbers, 
tailors, feather-makers were enlisted by the royal officers 
in the service of the drama. Scenery, properties and 
costume were of rich and elaborate design, and the com- 
mon notion that austere simplicity was an universal char- 
acteristic of dramatic production through Shakespeare's 
lifetime needs some radical modification, if due considera- 
tion be paid to the scenic methods which were habitual 
at Court. Spectacular embellishments characterised the 
performances of the regular drama no less than of masques 
and pageants. Painted canvas scenery was a common 
feature of all Court theatricals. The scenery was con- 
structed on the multiple or simultaneous principle which 
prevailed at the time in France and Italy and rendered 
superfluous change in the course of the performance. 
The various scenic backgrounds which the story of the 
play prescribed formed compartments (technically known 
as 'houses' or 'mansions') which were linked together 
so as to present to the audience an unbroken semicircle. 
The actors moved about the stage from compartment to 
compartment or from 'house' to 'house' as the develop- 
ment of the play required. This 'multiple setting' was 
invariably employed during Elizabeth's reign in the pro- 
duction at Court not merely of pageants or spectacles, 
but of the regular drama.^ In the reign of King James 

^ That scenic elaboration on the 'house' system, to which painted 
canvas scenery was essential, accompanied dramatic entertaiimients 



70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the scenic machinery at Court rapidly developed at the 
hands of Inigo Jones, the great architect, and separate 
set scenes with devices for their rapid change came to 
replace the old methods of simultaneous multiplicity. 
The costume too, at any rate in the production of 
masques, ultimately satisfied every call of archaeological or 
historical, as well as of artistic propriety. The perform- 
ances at Court always took place by night, and great 
attention was bestowed on the Hghting of the royal hall 
by means of candles and torches. The emoluments 
which were appointed for the players' labours at Court 
were substantial.^ For nearly twenty years Shakespeare 
and his intimate associates took a constant part in dra- 
matic representations which were rendered in these 
favoured conditions.- 

of all kinds at Queen Elizabeth's Court is clearly proved by the extant 
records of the Master of the Revels Office (Feuillerat's Le Bureau des 
Menus-Plaisirs, p. 66 ».). Sir Thomas Benger, Master of the Revels at 
the opening of the Queen's reign, gave, according to the documentary 
evidence, orders which his successors repeated 'for the apparelling, 
disgyzinge, flfurnishing, ffitting, garnishing & orderly setting foorthe 
of men, woomen and children : in sundry Tragedies, playes, maskes 
and sportes, with theier apte howses of paynted canvas & properties 
incident suche as mighte most lyvely expresse the effect of the histories 
plaied, &c.' (Feuillerat's Documents &c., 129). Elsewhere the evidence 
attests that 'six playes . . . were lykewise throwghly apparelled, & 
furniture, ffitted and garnished necessarely, & answerable to the matter, 
person and parte to be played : having also apt howses : made of can- 
vasse, fframed, ffashioned & paynted accordingly, as mighte best serve 
theier severall purposes. Together with sundry properties incident, 
ffashioned, paynted, garnished, and bestowed as the partyes them 
selves required and needed' {ibid. 145). In 1573 40J. was paid 'for 
canvas for the howses made for the players' {ibid. 221) and in 1574-5 
8/. 155. for canvas 'imployed upon the houses and properties made for 
the players' {ibid. 243). 

1 See pp. 290, 313 infra. 

* The activities of the players at the Courts of Elizabeth and James I 
are very amply attested. For the ofiicial organisation of the court 
performances and expenditure on the scenic arrangement during Queen 
Elizabeth's reign, see E. K. Chambers, Notes on the History of the Revels 
Office under the Tudors, 1906, and Feuillerat's Documents relating to the 
Office of the Revels in the Time of Elizabeth in Bang's Materialien, Bd. xxi. 
(Louvain, 1908) and in Le Bureau des Menus-Plaisirs et la mise en scene 
a la cour d' Elizabeth (Louvain, 1910). Court performances were formallj' 
registered in three independent repertories of original official documents, 
viz. : I. The Treasurer of the Chamber's Original Accounts (of which 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 7 1 

The royal example of requisitioning select perform- 
ances of plays by professional actors at holiday seasons 
was followed intermittently by noblemen and by the 
benchers of the Inns of Court. ^ Of the welcome which 
was accorded to travelling companies at private mansions 
Shakespeare offers a graphic picture in the 'Taming of 
the Shrew ' and in ' Hamlet.' In both pieces he laid under 
contribution his personal experience. Evidence, more- 
over, is at hand to show that his 'Comedy of Errors' 
was acted before benchers, students, and their guests 
(on Innocents' Day, Dec. 28, 1594) in the hall of Gray's 
Inn, and his 'Twelfth Night' in that of the Middle 
Temple on Candlemas Day, February 2, 160 1-2. In 
such environment the manner of presentation was iden- 
tical with that which was adopted at the Court. 

abstracts were entered in the Declared Accounts of the Audit Office, 
such abstracts being duplicated in the Rolls of the Pipe Office) ; 2. The 
Acts of The Privy Council ; and 3. The 'original accounts' or office books 
of the Masters of the Revels. The entries in the three series of records 
foUow different formulse, and the information which is given in one 
series supplements that given in the others. Only the Declared Accounts 
which abstract the Original Accounts and are duplicated in the Pipe 
Rolls, are now extant in a complete state. The bulk of all these records 
are preserved at the Public Record Office, but some fragments have 
drifted into the British Museum (Harl. MSS. 1641, 1642, and 1644) and 
into the Bodleian Library (Rawl. MSS. A 239 and 240). A selection of 
the accessible data down to 1585 was first printed in George Chalmers's 
An Apology for Believers, 1797, p. 394 seq., and this was reprinted with 
important additions in Malone's Variortim Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 360- 
409, 423-9, 445-50. Peter Cunningham, in his Extracts from the Revels 
at Court in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James the First (Shake- 
speare Society, 1842), confined his researches to the extant portions of 
the Treasurer of the Chamber's Original Accounts, and to the Master 
of the Revel's Office Books, between 1560 and 1619. Dr. C. W. Wallace, 
■ in The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare, Berlin, 191 2, 
pp. 199-225, prints most of the relevant documents in the Record Office 
respecting Court performances between 1558 and 1585. Mr. E. K. 
Chambers, in his 'Court Performances before Queen Elizabeth' {Mod. 
Lang. Review, 1907, pp. 1-13) and in his 'Court Performances under 
James I' {ib. 1909, pp. 153-66) valuably supplements the information 
which is printed elsewhere, from the Declared Accounts and the Pipe 
Rolls between 1558 and 1616. 

^ Dramatic performances which were more or less elaborately staged, 
were usually provided for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth and 
James I on their visits to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 
But the pieces were commonly written specially by graduates for the 
occasion, and were acted by amateur students. 



72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Methods of representation in the theatres of Shake- 
speare's day, whether of the pubHc or private type, had 
Methods of httle in common with the complex splendours 
presenta- in vogue at Court. Yet the crudity of the 
public equipment which is usually imputed to the 
theatres. Elizabethan theatre has been much exagger- 
ated. It was only in its first infancy that the 
Elizabethan stage showed that poverty of scenic ma- 
chinery which has been erroneously assigned to it through 
the whole of the Shakespearean era. The rude traditions 
of the innyard, the earhest pubHc home of the drama, 
were not eliminated quickly, and there was never any 
attempt to emulate the luxurious Court fashions, but 
there were many indications during Shakespeare's life- 
time of a steady development of scenic or spectacular 
appliances in professional quarters. The ' private ' play- 
house of which the Blackfriars was the most successful 
example mainly differed from the public theatre in the 
enhanced comfort which it assured the playgoer, and in 
the more select audience which the shghtly higher prices 
of admission encouraged. The substantial roof covering 
all parts of the house gave the 'private' theatre an ad- 
vantage over the 'public' theatre, the area of which was 
open to the sky, and the innovation of artificial Hghting 
proved a complementary attraction. The scenic appa- 
ratus and accessories of the 'private' theatre may have 
been more abundant and more refined than in the 'pub- 
lic' theatre. But there was no variation in principle 
and it was for the public theatres that most of Shake- 
speare's work as both actor and dramatist was done. 
In the result the scenic standards with which he was 
familiar outside the precincts of the Court fell far short 
of the elaboration which flourished there, but they ulti- 
mately satisfied the more modest calls of scenic illusion. 
Scenic spectacle invaded the regular playhouse at a much 
later date. In the Shakespearean theatre the equip- 
ment and machinery were always simple enough to throw 
on the actor a heavier responsibility than any which 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 73 

his successors knew. The dramatic effect owed almost 
everything to his intonation and gesture. The available 
evidence credits Elizabethan representations with making 
a profound impression on the audience. The fact bears 
signal tribute to the histrionic efficiency of the profession 
when it counted Shakespeare among its members. 

The Elizabethan public theatres were usually of oc- 
tagonal or circular shape. In their leading features they 
followed an uniform structural plan, but there Thestruc- 
were many variations in detail, which perplex turaipian. 
counsel. The area or pit was at the disposition 
of the 'groundlings' who crowded round three sides of 
the projecting stage. Their part of the building which 
was open to the sky was without seats. The charge for 
admission there was one penny. Beneath a narrow cir- 
cular roof of thatch three galleries, a development of the 
balconies of the quadrangular innyards, encircled the 
auditorium ; the two lower ones were partly divided into 
boxes or rooms while the uppermost gallery was unpar- 
titioned. The cost of entry to the galleries ranged from 
twopence in the highest tier to half a crown in the lowest. 
Seats or cushions were to be hired at a small additional 
fee. Foreign visitors to the Globe were emphatic in 
acknowledgment that from all parts of the house there 
was a full view of the stage.^ A small section of the 
audience was also accommodated in some theatres in less 
convenient quarters. In many houses visitors were 
allowed to occupy seats on the stage.^ Sometimes ex- 
pensive ' rooms ' or ' boxes ' were provided in an elevated 

^ A foreign visitor's manuscript diary, now in the Vatican, describes 
a visit to the Globe on Monday, July 3, 1600. His words ran ' Audivimus 
Comoediam Anglicam; theatrum ad morem antiquorum Romanorum 
constructum ex lignis, ita formatum ut omnibus ex partibus spectatores 
commodissime singula videre possint.' {The Times, April 4, 19 14.) 

2 Cf. Thomas Dekker, Guls Hornbook, 1609, chap. vi. ('How a Gallant 
should behave himself in a Playhouse') : 'Whether therefore the gather- 
ers [i.e. the money-takers] of the publique or private playhouses stand 
to receive the afternoones rent, let our Gallant (having paid it) presently 
advance himselfe up to the Throne of the stage on the very Rushes where 
the Comedy is to dance. ... By sitting on the stage you may have a 
good stool for sixpence,' 



74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

gallery overlooking the back of the stage. It has been 
estimated that the Globe Theatre held some 1200 spec- 
tators, and the Blackfriars half that number.^ 

The stage was a rough development of the old impro- 
vised raised platform of the innyard. It ran far into the 
auditorium so that the actors often spoke in 

e stage. ^^^ centre of the house, with the audience of 
the arena well-nigh encircling them. There was no front 
curtain or proscenium arch. The wall which closed the 
stage at the rear had two short and slightly projecting 
wings, each of which was pierced by a door opening side- 
ways on the boards while a third door in the back wall 
directly faced the auditorium. Through one or other of 
the three doors the actors made their entrances and exits 
and thence they marched to the front of the platform. 
Impinging on the backward limit of the stage was the 
'tiring house' ('mimorum aedes') which was commonly 
of two stories. There the actors had their dressing-rooms. 

^ Cf. C. W. Wallace, The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597- 
1603, 1908, pp. 49 seq. The chief pieces of documentary evidence as 
to the internal structure of the Elizabethan theatres are the detailed 
building contracts for the erection of the Fortune Theatre in 1600 after 
the plan of the Globe and of the Hope Theatre in 1613 after the plan 
of the Swan. Both are at Dulwich and were first printed by Malone 
{Variorum, iii. 338 seq.) and more recently in Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, 
pp. 4 seq. and 19 seq. A Dutchman John De Witt visiting London in 
1596 made a drawing of the interior of the Swan Theatre, a copy of 
which is extant in the library at Utrecht. A short description in Latin 
is appended. De Witt's sketch is of great interest, not merely from its 
size and completeness, but as being the only strictly contemporary pic- 
ture of the interior of a sixteenth century playhouse which has yet come 
to light. At the same time it is difi&cult to reconcile De Witt's sketch 
with the other extant information. He may have depended for his de- 
tail on memory. His statement that the Swan Theatre held 3000 per- 
sons 'in sedilibus' {i.e. in the seated galleries apart from the arena) 
would seem to be an exaggeration (see Zur Kenntniss der Altenglischen 
Buhne von Karl Theodor Gaedertz. Mit der ersten atithentischen innern 
Ansicht des Schwan-T heaters in London, Bremen, 1888). Three later 
pictorial representations of a seventeenth-centurj^ stage are known; all 
are of small size and they differ in detail from De Witt and from one 
another; they appear respectively on the title-pages of William Ala- 
baster's Roxana (1632), of Nathaniel Richards's Tragedy of Messallina 
(1640), and of The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (1672). The last is de- 
scribed as the stage of the Red Bull Theatre. The theatres shown on 
the two other seventeenth-century engravings are not named. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 75 

From the first story above the central stage door there 
usually projected a narrow balcony forming an elevated 
or upper stage overhanging the back of the great plat- 
form and leaving the two side doors free. From this 
balcony the actors spoke ('aloft' or 'above') when occa- 
sion required it to those below. From such an elevation 
Juliet addressed Romeo in the balcony scene, and the 
citizens of Angers (in 'King John') or of Harfleur (in 
'Henry V) held colloquy from their ramparts with the 
English besiegers. At times room was also found in the 
balcony f.or musicians or indeed for a limited number of 
spectators. From the fore-edge of the balcony there 
hung sliding ' arras' curtains, technically known as 'trav- 
erses.' The background which these curtains formed 
when they were drawn together, gave the stage one of 
its most distinctive features. The recess beyond the 
'traverses' served, when they were drawn back, as an 
interior which stage directions often designated as 
'within.' It was in this fashion that a cave, an arbour, 
or a bedchamber was commonly presented. In ' Romeo 
and Juliet' (v. iii.) the space exposed to view behind the 
curtains was the tomb of the Capulets; in 'Timon of 
Athens ' and in ' Cymbeline ' it formed a cave ; in ' The 
Tempest' it was Prospero's cell.^ 

^ Much special study has been bestowed of late years by students 
m England, America, France, and Germany on the shape and appoint- 
ments of the Elizabethan stage as well as on the methods of Elizabethan 
representation. The variations in practice at different theatres have 
occasioned controversy. The minute detail which recent writers have 
recovered from contemporary documents or from printed literature 
far exceeds that which their predecessors accumulated. Yet the earlier 
researches of Malone, J. P. Collier and F. G. Fleay illuminated most 
of the broad issues and remain of value, in spite of errors which later 
writers have corrected. Perhaps the most important of the numerous 
recent expositions of the structure and methods of the Elizabethan 
theatre are G. F. Reynolds's Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging, 
Chicago, 1905 ; William Creizenach's Die Schauspiele der Englischen 
Komodianten, Berlin and Stuttgart (n.d.) ; Richard Wegener's Die 
Buhneneinrichtimg des Shakespeareschen Theaters nach der zeitgenossischen 
Dramen, Halle, 1907 ; Dr. Wallace, Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 
Nebraska, 1908; Mr. William Archer's article 'The Elizabethan Stage' 
in the Quarterly Review, 1908; Victor E. Albright's The Shakesperian 



76 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

A slanting canopy of thatch was fixed high above the 
stage ; technically known as ' the shadow ' or ' the 
heavens,' it protected the actors from the elements, to 
which the spectators in the arena were exposed. The 
tapestry hangings were suspended from this covering, at 
some height from the stage, but well within view of the 
audience. When tragedies were performed, the hangings 
were of black. ' Hung be the heavens with hlack ' — the 
opening words of the First Part of ' Henry VI ' — had 
in theatrical terminology a technical significance.^ The 
platform stage was fitted with trap-doors from which 
ghosts and spirits ascended or descended. Thunder 
was simulated and guns were fired from apartments in 
the ' tiring house ' behind or above the stage. It was at 
a performance of 'Henry VIII' 'that certain cannons 
being shot off at the King's entry, some of the paper or 
other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light 
on the thatch' of the stage roof, 'and so caused a fire 
which demolished the theatre.' ^ 

The set scenery or ' painted canvas ' which was familiar 
at Court was unknown to the Elizabethan theatre ; but 
there were abundant endeavours to supplement the scenic 
illusion of the 'traverses' by a lavish use of properties. 
Rocks, tombs, and trees (made of canvas and paste- 
board), thrones, tables, chairs, and beds were among a 
hundred articles which were in constant request. The 
name of the place in which the author located his scene 
was often inscribed on a board exhibited on the stage, or 
was placarded above one or other of the side-doorways 
of entry and exit. Sir Philip Sidney, in the pre-Shake- 
spearean days of the Elizabethan theatre, made merry 
over the embarrassments which the spectators suffered 
by such notifications of dramatic topography. He con- 
doled, too, with the playgoer whose imagination was left 
to create on the bare platform a garden, a rocky coast, 

Stage, New York, 1909; and Mr. W. J. Lawrence's The Elizabethan 
Playhouse and other Studies, two series, 191 2-13. 

^ Cf. 'Black stage for tragedies and murders fell.' Lucrece, 1. 766. 

2 See p. 445 infra. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 77 

and a battle-field in quick succession.^ But the use alike 
of properties and of the inner curtains greatly facilitated 
scenic illusion on the public stage after Sidney's time, 
and although his criticism never lost all its point, it is 
not literally applicable to the theatrical production of 
Shakespeare's prime.^ 

Costume on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages was 
somewhat in advance of the scenic standards. There 
was always opportunity for the exercise of artistic in- 
genuity in the case of fanciful characters like 'Rumour 
painted full of tongues' in the Second Part of 'Henry IV,' 
or 'certain reapers properly habited' in the masque of 
'The Tempest.' But the actors in normal roles wore the 
ordinary costumes of the day without precise reference 
to the period or place of action. Ancient Greeks and 
Romans were attired in doublet and hose, or, if they 
were soldiers, in Tudor armour. The contents of the 
theatrical wardrobe were often of rich material and in 
the height of current fashion. Many foreign 
visitors to London recorded in their diaries 
their admiration of the splendour of the leading actors' 
costume.^ False hair and beards, crowns and sceptres, 

^ Sidney's Apology for Poetrie, ed. by E. S. Shuckburgh, p. 52. 

^ Only after the Restoration in 1660 did the public theatres adopt 
the curtain in front of the stage and the changeable scenic cloth at the 
back. Both devices were employed in dramatic performances at James 
I's court. The crudity of the scenic apparatus on the popular stage in 
James I and Charles I's reign has been unduly emphasised. Richard 
Flecknoe in his Short Discourse of the English Stage published in 1664 
generalised rather too sweepingly when he wrote 'The theatres of for- 
mer times had no other scenes or decorations of the stage, but only 
old tapestry and the stage strewd with rushes.' (Hazlitt, English 
Drama, Documents and Treatises, p. 280.) On the other hand tapestry 
hangings, if the illustrations in Rowe's edition of Shakespeare (1709) are 
to be trusted, still occasionally formed in the early eighteenth century 
the stage background of Shakespearean productions, in spite of the 
almost universal adoption of painted scenic cloths. 

' German writers seem to have measured fine costume by the stand- 
ards of magnificence which they reckoned characteristic of English 
actors. Well-dressed Germans were said to 'strut along like the Eng- 
lish comedians in the theatres' (J. O. Variscus, Ethnographia Mundi, 
pars iv, Geldtklage, Magdeburg, 1614, p. 472, cited in Cohn's Shake- 
speare in Germany, p. cxxxvi.) 



78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

mitres and croziers, armour, helmets, shields, vizors, and 
weapons of war, hoods, bands, and cassocks, were freely 
employed to indicate differences of age, rank, or profes- 
sion. Towards the close of Shakespeare's career, plays 
on English history were elaborately 'costumed.' In the 
summer of 1613 'Henry VIII' 'was set forth with many 
extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even 
to the matting of the stage ; the Knights of the Order, 
with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their 
embroidered coats, and the Uke.' ^ 

A very notable distinction between Elizabethan and 
modern modes of theatrical representations was the com- 
Absence of P^^te absencc of women actors from the Eliza- 
women bethan stage. All female roles were, until the 
Restoration, assumed in public theatres by men 
or boys. Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men 
or boys in women's parts when he makes Rosalind say 
laughingly to the men of the audience in the epilogue to 
'As You Like It' 'If I were a woman I would kiss as 
many of you as had beards that please me.' Similarly, 
in 'Antony and Cleopatra' (v. ii. 216-220), Cleopatra 
on her downfall laments 

the quick comedians 
Extemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see 
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness. 

Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks. 
In 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Flute is bidden (i. ii. 52) 
by Quince play Thisbe 'in a mask' because he has a 
beard coming. It is clear that during Shakespeare's pro- 
fessional career boys or young men rendered female roles 
effectively and without serious injury to the dramatist's 
conceptions. Although age was always telling on mas- 
culine proficiency in women's parts and it was never 
easy to conceal the inherent incongruity of the habit, the 
prejudice against the presence of women on the pubHc 
stage faded slowly. It did not receive its death-blow till 
December 8, 1660, when at a new theatre in Clare Market 

^ See p. 443 infra. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 79 

a prologue announced the first appearance of women on 
the stage and intimated that the role of Desdemona was 
no longer to be entrusted to a petticoated page.^ 

Three flourishes on a trumpet announced the beginning 
of the performance. The trumpeter was stationed within 
a lofty open turret overlooking the stage. No pro- 
grammes were distributed among the audience. The 
name of the day's play was placarded beforehand on 
posts in the street. Such advertisements were called 
'the players' 'bills/ and a similar 'bill' was paraded on 
the stage at the opening of the performance. Musical 
diversion was provided on a more or less ample scale. A 
band of musicians stood either on the stage or in a neigh- 
bouring box or 'room.' They not merely accompanied 
incidental songs or dances, and sounded drum and trum- 
pet in military episodes, but they provided instrumental 
interludes between the acts.^ The scenes of each act 

^ See pp. 600-1 infra. The prologue, which was by the hack poetThomas 
Jordan, sufi&ciently exposed the demerits of the old custom : 

I come unknown to any of the rest, 
To tell you news : I saw the lady drest : 
The woman plays to-day ; mistake me not, 
No man in gown, or page in petticoat. 

In this reforming age 

We have intents to civilize the stage. 

Our women are defective and so siz'd 

You'd think they were some of the guard disguis'd. 

For to speak truth, men act, that are between 

Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen ; 

With bone so large, and nerve so incompliant, 

When you call Desdemona, enter Giant. 

The ancient practice of entrusting women's parts to men survived in 
the theatres of Rome till the end of the eighteenth century, and Goethe 
who was there in 1786 and 1787 describes the highly favourable impres- 
sion which that histrionic method left on him, and seeks somewhat para- 
doxically to justify it as satisfying the aesthetic aims of imitation {Travels 
in Italy, Bohn's Libr. 1885, pp. 567-571). On the other hand, Mon- 
tesquieu reports on his visit to England in 1730 how he heard Lord 
Chesterfield explain to Queen Caroline that the regrettable absence of 
women from the Elizabethan stage accounted for the coarseness and 
inadequacy of Shakespeare's female characterisation (Montesquieu, 
(Euvres Completes, ed. Laboulaye, 1879, vii. 484). 

^ See G. H. Cowling, Music on the Shakespearean Stage, Cambridge, 
1913 ; and W. J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies, 
ist ser. 191 2, ch. iv. 



8o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

would seem to have followed one another without any 
longer pause than was required by the exits and entries 
of the actors. The absence of a front curtain might well 
leave an audience in some uncertainty as to the point 
at which a scene or act ended. In blank verse dramas a 
rhyming couplet at the end of a scene often gave the 
needful cue, or the last speaker openly stated that he 
and the other actors were withdrawing.^ 

In Shakespeare's early days the public theatres were 
open on Sundays as well as on week-days ; but the Puri- 
tan outcry gradually forced the actors to leave the stage 
untenanted on the Lord's Day. In the later years of 
Queen Elizabeth's reign, Sunday performances were for- 
bidden by the Privy Council on pain of imprisonment, 
but it was only during her successor's reign that they 
ceased altogether; they were not forbidden by statute 
till 1628 (3 Car. I, c. i) and the example of the Court 
which favoured dramatic entertainment on the Sabbath 
always challenged the popular religious scruple. More 
effective and more embarrassing to the players was the 
Privy Council's prohibition of performances during the 
season of Lent, and 'Hkewise at such time and times as 
any extraordinary sickness or infection of disease shall 
appear to be in or about the city.' ^ The announcement 
of thirty deaths a week of the plague was held to warrant 
the closing of the theatres until the rate of mortality fell 
below that figure.^ At the public theatres the perform- 

^ For example, in Shakespeare's Tempest the last words of nearly 
every scene are to such effect; cf. 'Come, follow' (i. ii.), 'Go safely 
on' (11. i.), 'Follow, I pray you' (iii. iii.), and 'Follow and do me ser- 
vice' (iv. i.). Similarly in tragedies the closing words of the text often 
categorically direct the removal of the dead heroes; cf. Hamlet, v. iii. 
393, 'Take up the bodies,' and Coriolanus, v. vi. 148, 'Take him [i.e. 
the dead hero] up.' Hotspur, when slain, in i Henry IV, is carried off 
on Falstafif's back. 

2 Cf. Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent, vol. xxx. 1599- 
1600, p. 397; see Earle's Microcosmographie xxiii. ('A Player') : 'Lent 
is more damage to him [i.e. the player] than the butcher' (the sale of 
meat being forbidden during Lent). 

^ See Privy Council Warrant, April 9, 1604, in Henslowe Papers, 
ed. Greg, 1907, p. 61 ; and cf. Middleton's Your Five Gallants, licensed 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 8 1 

ances usually began at two o'clock in winter and three 
o'clock in the summer and they lasted from two to three 
hours.^ No artificial light was admitted, unless the text 
of the play prescribed the use of a lantern or a candle on 
the stage. 

However important the difference between the organi- 
sation of the pubHc theatres in Shakespeare's day and 
our own, many professional customs which fell Provincial 
within his experience still survive without much *^°^'^^- 
change. The practice of touring in the provinces 
was followed in Queen Elizabeth's and James I's 
reigns with a frequency which subsequent ages scarcely 
excelled. The chief actors rode on horseback, while 
their properties were carried in wagons. The less pros- 
perous companies which were colloquially distinguished 
by the epithet ' strolling ' avoided London altogether and 
only sought the suffrages of provincial audiences. But 
no companies with headquarters in London remained 
there through the summer or autumn, and every country 
town with two thousand or more inhabitants could safely 
reckon on at least one visit of actors from the capital 
between May and October. The compulsory closing of 
the London theatres during the ever-recurrent outbreaks 
of plague or lack of sufficient theatrical accommodation 
in the capital at times drove thriving London actors into 
the provinces at other seasons than summer and autumn. 
Now and then the London companies were on tour in 
mid-winter. Many records of the Elizabethan actors' 
provincial visits figure in municipal archives of the 

March 22, 1608: "Tis e'en as uncertain as playing, now up and now 
down ; for if the bill do rise to above thirty, here's no place for players.' 
The prohibiting rate of mortality was raised to 40 in 1620. 

^ When the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon petitioned the Lord Mayor 
on Oct. 8, 1594, to permit Shakespeare's company to perform during 
the winter at the 'Crosskeys' in Gracechurch Street, it was stated that 
the performances would 'begin at two and have done betweene fower 
and five' (Halliwell's Illustrations, 32). For acting purposes the author's 
text was often drastically abbreviated, so as to bring the performance 
within the two hours limit which Shakespeare twice lightly mentions — 
in prologues to Romeo and Juliet (line 12) and to Henry VIII (line 13). 

G 



82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

period. The local records have not yet been quite ex- 
haustively searched but the numerous entries which have 
come to light attest the wide range of the players' cir- 
cuits. Shakespeare's company, whose experience is 
typical of that of the other London companies of the 
time, performed in thirty-one towns outside the me- 
tropolis during the twenty-seven years between 1587 and 
1 6 14, and the separate visits reached, as far as is known, 
a total of eighty. The itinerary varied in duration and 
direction from year to year. In 1593 Shakespeare and 
his fellow players were seen at eight provincial cities and 
in 1606 at six. They would appear to have contented 
themselves with a single visit in 1590 (to Faversham), 
in 1591 (to Cambridge), in 1602 (to Ipswich), and in 161 1 
(to Shrewsbury). Their route never took them far 
north ; they never passed beyond York, which they 
visited twice. But in all parts of the southern half of 
the kingdom they were more or less familiar figures. 
To each of the cities Coventry and Oxford they paid 
eight visits and to Bath six. To Marlborough, Shrews- 
bury and Dover they went five times, and to Cambridge 
four times. Gloucester, Leicester, Ipswich and Maidstone 
come next in the provincial scale of favour with three 
visits apiece. Apparently Southampton, Chester, Not- 
tingham, Folkestone, Exeter, Hythe, Saffron Walden, 
Rye, Plymouth, and Chelmsford did not invite the com- 
pany's return after a first experience, nor did Canterbury, 
Bristol, Barnstaple, Norwich, York, New Romney, 
Faversham, and Winchester after a second.^ 

^ In English Dramatic Companies 1558-1642 (1910) Mr. J. Tucker 
Murray has carefully, though not exhaustively, investigated the actors' 
tours of the period. His work supersedes, however, Halliwell-Phillipps's 
Visits of Shakespeare's Company of Actors to the Provincial Cities and 
Towns of England (privately printed, 1887). Thomas Hey wood in his 
Apology for Actors mentions performances by unidentified companies 
at Lynn in Norfolk and at Perrin in Cornwall. These are not noticed 
by Mr. Murray, who also overlooks visits of Shakespeare's company 
to Oxford and Maidstone in 1593, to Cambridge in 1594, and to Notting- 
ham in 1615. (See F. S. Boas's University Drama, p. 226, and his 'Ham- 
let in Oxford,' Fortnightly Review, August 1913; Cooper's Annals of 
Cambridge, ii. 538; Nottingham Records, iv. 328, and Maidstone Cham- 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 



83 



Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling 
all his professional functions, and some of the references 
to travel in his Sonnets have been reasonably interpreted 
as reminiscences of early acting tours. It is clear that 
he had ample opportunities of first-hand observation of 
his native land. But it has often been argued Scottish 
that his journeys passed beyond the limits of ^°^^^- 
England. It has been repeatedly urged that Shake- 
speare's company visited Scotland and that he went 
with it.^ In November 1599 English actors arrived 
in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher 
and one Martin Slater,^ and were welcomed with enthu- 
siasm by the King.^ 

berlains' Accounts, MS. notes kindly communicated by Miss Katharine 
Martin.) The following seems to have been the itinerary of Shake- 
speare's company year by year while he was associated with it : 



1587 Dover, Canterbury, Oxford, 1597 

Marlborough, Southamp- 
ton, Exeter, Bath, Glouces- 
ter, Stratford-on-Avon, 1602 
Lathom House, Lanes., 1603 
Coventry (twice), Leices- 1604 
ter, Maidstone, and Nor- 1605 
wich. 1606 

1588 Dover, Plymouth, Bath, 

Gloucester, York, Coven- 
try, Norwich, Ipswich, 1607 
Cambridge. 

1590 Faversham. 1608 

1591 Cambridge. 1609 

1592 Canterbury, Bath, Glouces- 

ter and Coventry. 1610 

1593 Chelmsford, Bristol, Bath, 161 1 

Shrewsbury, Chester, 161 2 

York, Maidstone and 1613 
Oxford. 

1594 Coventry, Cambridge, Leices- 16 14 

ter, Winchester, Marl- 16 15 
borough. 

^ Cf. Knight's Life of Shakespeare (1843), p. 41 ; Fleay, Stage, pp. 135-6. 

2 Martin Slater (often known as Martin) was both an actor and 
dramatist. From 1594 to 1597 he was a member of the Admiral's Com- 
pany, and was subsequently from 1605 to 1625 manager of a subsidiary 
travelling company, under the patronage of Queen Anne. Cf. Dr. 
Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. 383. 

^ The favour bestowed by James VI on these English actors was so 



Faversham, Rye, Dover, 
Marlborough, Bristol, 

Bath. 

Ipswich. 

Shrewsbury, Coventry. 

Bath, Oxford, Mortlake. 

Barnstaple, Oxford. 

Marlborough, Oxford, Leices- 
ter, Saffron Walden, 
Dover, Maidstone. 

Barnstaple, Oxford, Cam- 
bridge. 

Marlborough, Coventry. 

Ipswich, Hythe, New Rom- 
ney. 

Dover, Oxford, Shrewsbury. 

Shrewsbury. 

New Romney, Winchester. 

Folkestone, Oxford, Shrews- 
bury. 

Coventry. 

Nottingham. 



84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but 
is not known to have been one earlier. Shakespeare's 
company never included Martin Slater. Fletcher re- 
peated the Scottish visit in October 1601 } There is noth- 
ing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to 
Shakespeare's company. In like manner, Shakespeare's 
accurate reference in 'Macbeth' to the 'nimble' but 
' sweet ' climate of Inverness ^ and the vivid impression 
he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths have 
been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experi- 
ence; but the passages in question, into which a more 
definite significance has possibly been read than Shake- 
speare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his 
inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and at 
the theatres after James I's accession. 

A few English actors in Shakespeare's day combined 
from time to time to make professional tours through 
foreign lands, where Court society invariably gave 
them a hospitable reception. In Denmark, Germany, 

marked as to excite the resentment of the leaders of the Kirk. The 
English agent, George Nicholson, in a (hitherto unpublished) despatch 
dated from Edinburgh on November 12, 1599, wrote : 'The four Sessions 
of this Town (without touch by name of our English players, Fletcher 
and Mertyn (i.e. Martyn), with their company), and not knowing the 
King's ordinances for them to play and be heard, enacted (that) their 
flocks (were) to forbear and not to come to or haunt profane games, 
sports, or plays.' Thereupon the King summoned the sessions before 
him in Council and threatened them with the full rigour of the law. 
Obdurate at first, the ministers subsequently agreed to moderate their 
hostile references to the actors. Finally, Nicholson adds, 'The King 
this day by proclamation with sound of trumpet hath commanded the 
players liberty to play, and forbidden their hinder or impeachment 
therein.' (MS. State Papers Dom. Scotlatid, P.R.O. vol. Ixv. No. 64.) 

^ Fleay, Stage, pp. 126-44. On returning to England Fletcher seems 
to have given a performance at Ipswich on May 30, 1602, and to have 
irresponsibly called himself and his companions 'His Majesty's Players.' 
Cf. Murray's English Dramatic Companies, i. 104 n. 

2 Cf. Duncan's speech (on arriving at Macbeth's castle of Inverness) : 

This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air 
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
Unto our gentle senses. 

Banquo. This guest of summer. 

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, 
By his lov'd mansionry, that the heaven's breath 
Smells wooingly here. ('Macbeth,' i. vi. 1-6.) 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 85 

Austria, Holland, and France many dramatic perform- 
ances were given at royal palaces or in public 
places by English actors between 1580 and 1630. actors on 
The foreign programmes included tragedies or [J^^g^^"'^' 
comedies which had proved their popularity 
on the London stage, together with more or less extem- 
porized interludes of boisterous farce. Some of Shake- 
speare's plays found early admission to the foreign reper- 
tories. At the outset the English language was alone 
employed, although in Germany a native comedian was 
commonly associated with the English players and he 
spoke his part in his ov/n tongue. At a later period the 
English actors in Germany ventured on crude German 
translations of their repertory.^ German-speaking audi- 
ences proved the most enthusiastic of all foreign clients, 
and the towns most frequently visited were Frankfort- 
on-the-Main, Strasburg, Nuremberg, Cassel, and Augs- 
burg. Before Shakespeare's life ended, English actors 
had gone on professional missions in German-speaking 
countries as far East as Konigsberg and Ortelsburg and 
as far South as Munich and Graz.^ 

That Shakespeare joined any of these foreign expedi- 

^ There was published in 1620 sine loco (apparently at Leipzig) a 
volume entitled Engelische Comedien vtid Tragedien containing German 
renderings of ten English plays and five interludes which had been 
lately acted by English companies in Germany. The collection in- 
cluded crude versions of Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona. A second edition appeared in 1624 and a second volume 
('ander theil') — Engelische Comodien — followed in 1630 supplying 
eight further plays, none of which can be identified with extant English 
pieces. In the library at Dresden is a rough German translation in 
manuscript of the first quarto of Hamlet ('Der bestrafte Brudermord'), 
which is clearly, of very early origin. Early German manuscript ren- 
derings of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet are also extant. 
(Cf. Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany, 1865.) 

2 Thomas Hey wood in his Apology for Actors, 161 2 (Shakespeare 
Soc. 1841), mentions how in former years Lord Leicester's company of 
English comedians was entertained at the court of Denmark (p. 40), 
how at Amsterdam B^nglish actors had lately performed before the 
burghers and the chief inhabitants (p. 58), and how at the time of writ- 
ing the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Cardinal 
at Bruxelles each had in their pay a company of English comedians 
(p. 60). Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865; E. Herz's Englische 
Schauspieler und englisches Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares in Deutsck- 



86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

tions is improbable. Few actors of repute at home took 
part in them ; the majority of the foreign performers 
never reached the first rank. Many Usts of those who 
joined in the tours are extant, and Shakespeare's name 
appears in none of them. It would seem, moreover, that 
only on two occasions, and both before Shakespeare 
joined the theatrical profession, did members of his own 
company visit the Continent.^ 

It is, in fact, unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot 
on the Continent of Europe in either a private or a pro- 
Shake- fessional capacity. He repeatedly ridicules the 
speare and craze for foreign travel.^ To Italy, it is true, 
^^^' and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like 

Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, he makes 
frequent and familiar reference, and he supplied many 
a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment. But 
his Italian scenes lack the intimate detail which would 
attest a first-hand experience of the country. The pres- 
ence of barges on the waterways of northern Italy was 
common enough partially to justify the voyage of Valen- 

land, Hamburg, 1903; H. Maas's 'Aussere Geschichte der Englischen 
Theatertruppen in dem Zeitraum von 1559 bis 1642 ' (Bang's Materialien, 
vol. xix. Louvain, 1907); J. Bolte's 'Englisclie Komodianten in Dane- 
mark und Schweden' (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxiv. p. 99, 1888); and 
his 'Englische Komodianten in Miinster und Ulm' {ibid, xxxvi. p. 273, 
1900); K. Trautmann's 'Englische Kom^odianten in Niirnberg, 1593- 
1648' {Archiv, vols. xiv. and xv.) ; Meissner, Die englischen Comodianten 
zur Zeit Shakespeare'' s in Oesterreich, Vienna, 1884; Jon Stefansson on 
'Shakespeare at Elsinore' in Contemporary Review, Jan. 1896; and M. 
Jusserand's Shakespeare in France, 1899, pp. 50 seq. 

^ In 1585 and 1586 a detachment of Lord Leicester's servants made 
tours through Germany, which were extended to the Danish Court at 
Elsinore. The leader was the comic actor, William Kemp, who was 
subsequently to become for a time a prominent colleague of Shake- 
speare. In the closing years of the sixteenth century the Earl of 
Worcester's company chiefly supplied the English actors who undertook 
expeditions on the European Continent. The Englishmen who won 
foreign histrionic fame early in the seventeenth century were rarely 
known at home. 

2 Cf. As You Like It, iv. i. 22 seq. (Rosalind loq.), 'Farewell, Monsieur 
Traveller : look you lisp and wear strange suits ; disable all the benefits 
of your own country ; be out of love with your nativity and almost chide 
God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think 
you have swam in a gondola.' 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 87 

tine by 'ship' from Verona to Milan ('Two Gent.' i. 
i. 71). But Prospero's embarkation in 'The Tempest' 
on an ocean ship at the gates of Milan (i. ii. 129-144) 
renders it difficult to assume that the dramatist gathered 
his Italian knowledge from personal observation.^ He 
doubtless owed all to the verbal reports of travelled 
friends, or to books the contents of which he had a rare 
power of assimilating and vitalising. 

The publisher Chettle wrote in 1592 that Shakespeare 
was 'exelent in the qualitie ^ he professes/ and the old 
actor William Beeston asserted in the next century that 
Shakespeare 'did act exceedingly well.' ^ But the roles 
in which he distinguished himself are imper- ^^lake- 
fectly recorded. Few surviving documents speare's 
refer specifically to performances by him. At ''"^^' 
Christmas 1594 he joined the popular actors William 
Kemp, the chief comedian of the day, who had lately 
created Peter in 'Romeo and Juliet,' and Richard Bur- 
bage, the greatest tragic actor, who had lately created 
Richard III, in ' two several comedies or interludes' which 
were acted on St. Stephen's Day and on Innocents' Day 
(December 26 and 28) at Greenwich Palace before the 
Queen. The three players received in accordance with 
the accepted tariff 'xiij/f. YJs. vujd. and by waye of her 
Majesties reward vjli. xiijs. iiijc^. in all xx/i.' ^ Neither 
plays nor parts are mentioned. 

^ Cf. Elze, Essays, 1874, pp. 254 seq. Dr. Gregor Sarrazin in a series 
of well-informed papers generally entitled Neue italienische Skizzen Z7i 
Shakespeare (in the Shakespeare Jahrbiich, 1895, 1900, 1903, 1906), argues 
in favour of Shakespeare's personal experience of Italian travel, and his 
view is ably supported by Sir Edward Sullivan in ' Shakespeare and the 
Waterways of North Italy' in Nineteenth Century, 1908, ii. 215 seq. But 
the absence of any direct confirmation of an Italian visit leaves Dr. 
Sarrazin's and Sir Edward's arguments very shadowy. 

2 'Quality' in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the 
actor's 'profession.' 

^ Aubrey's Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226. 

* The entry figures in the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Royal 
Chamber (Pipe Office Declared Accounts, vol. 542, fol. 207b, Public 
Record Office) which are the chief available records of the acting com- 
panies' performances at Court. Mention is sometimes made of the 
plays produced, but the parts assumed by professional actors at Court 



88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare's name stands fir^t on the hst of those 
who took part in 1598 in the original production by the 
Lord Chamberlain's servants, apparently at 'The Cur- 
tain,' of Ben Jonson's earliest and best-known comedy 
'Every Man in his Humour.' Five years later, in 1603, 
a second play by Ben Jonson, his tragedy of 'Sejanus,' 
was first produced at the ' Globe ' by Shakespeare's com- 
pany, then known as the King's servants. Shakespeare 
was again one of the interpreters. In the original cast 
of this play the actor's names are arranged in two 
columns, and Shakespeare's name heads the second 
column, standing parallel with Burbage's, which heads 
the first.^ The lists of actors in Ben Jonson's plays fail 
to state the character allotted to each actor ; but it is 
reasonably claimed that in 'Every Man in his Humour' 
Shakespeare filled the role of 'Kno'well an old gentle- 
man.' 2 John Davies of Hereford noted that he 'played 
some kingly parts in sport.' ^ One of Shakespeare's 
younger brothers, presumably Gilbert, often came 
(wrote Oldys) to London in his younger days to see his 
brother act in his own plays ; and in his old age, and 
with failing memory, he recalled his brother's perform- 
ance of Adam in ' As You Like It ' when the dramatist 
'wore a long beard.''* Rowe, Shakespeare's first biog- 
rapher, identified only one of Shakespeare's parts — - 
'the Ghost in his own "Hamlet."' He declared his 
assumption of that character to be 'the top of his per- 
formance.' Until the close of Shakespeare's career his 

are never stated. It is very rare, as in the present instance, to find the 
actors in the royal presence noticed individually. No name is usually 
found save that of the manager or assistant-manager to whom the royal 
fee was paid. (Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 121 ; Mrs. Stopes in Jahrhiich 
der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschafi, 1896, xxxii. 182 seq.) 

^ The date of the first performance with the lists of the original actors 
of Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour and of his Sejanus is given in 
Jonson's works, 1616, fol. The first quarto editions of Every Man in 
his Humour (1598) and of Sejanus (1605) omit these particulars. 

^ In the first edition Jonson gave his characters Italian names and 
old Kno'well was there called Lorenzo di Pazzi senior. 

^ Scourge of Folly, 1610, epigr. 159. 

^ James Yeo well's Memoir ofWilliamOldys (1862), p. 46 : cf.p. /^6oinfra. 



ON THE LONDON STAGE 89 

company was frequently summoned to act at Court, and 
it is clear that he regularly accompanied them. The 
plays which he and his colleagues produced before his 
sovereign in his lifetime included his own pieces 'Love's 
Labour's Lost,' 'The Comedy of Errors,' 'The Merchant 
of Venice,' ' i Henry IV,' 'The Merry Wives of Windsor,' 
'Henry V,' 'Much Ado about Nothing/ 'Othello,' 
'Measure for Measure,' 'King Lear,' 'A Winter's Tale,' 
and 'The Tempest.' It may be presumed that in all 
these dramas some role was allotted him. In the 1623 
folio edition of Shakespeare's 'Works' his name heads the 
prefatory list 'of the principall actors in all these playes.' 
That Shakespeare chafed under some of the conditions 
of the actors' calHng is commonly inferred from the 
'Sonnets.' There he reproaches himself with becoming 
'a motley to the view' (ex. 2), and chides fortune for 
having provided for his livelihood nothing better than 
public means that public manners breed, whence his 
name received a brand (cxi. 4-5). If such regrets are to 
be Hterally or personally interpreted, they only reflected 
an evanescent mood. His interest in whatever touched 
the efficiency of his profession was permanently active. 
All the technicalities of the theatre were familiar to him. 
He was a keen critic of actors' elocution, and in 'Ham- 
let' shrewdly denounced their common failings, while he 
clearly and hopefully pointed out the road to improve- 
ment. As a shareholder in the two chief playhouses of 
his time,^ he long studied at close quarters the practical 
organisation of theatrical effort. His highest ambitions 
lay, it is true, elsewhere than in acting or theatrical 
management, and at an early period of his theatrical 
career he undertook, with triumphant success, the labours 
of a playwright. It was in dramatic poetry that his 
genius found its goal. But he pursued the profession of 
an actor and fulfilled all the obligations of a theatrical 
shareholder loyally and uninterruptedly until very near 
the date of his death. 

^ See pp. 300 seq. infra. 



VII 

FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 

The English drama as an artistic or poetic branch of 
literature developed with magical rapidity. It had not 
Pre-Eiiza- P^ssed the stage of infancy when Shakespeare 
bethan left Stratford-on-Avon for London, and within 
rama. three decades the unmatched strength of its 
maturity was spent. The Middle Ages were fertile 
in 'miracles' and 'mysteries' which were embryonic 
dramatisations of the Scriptural narrative or legends of 
Saints. Late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth 
century there flourished 'moralities' or moral plays 
where allegorical figures interpreted more or less dra- 
matically the significance of virtues or vices. But these 
rudimentary efforts lacked the sustained plot, the por- 
trayal of character, the distinctive expression and the 
other genuine elements of dramatic art. No very ma- 
terial change was effected in the middle of the sixteenth 
century by the current vogue of the interlude — an off- 
shoot of the morality. There the allegorical machinery 
of the morahty was superseded by meagre sketches of 
men and women, presenting in a crude dramatic fashion 
and without the figurative intention of the morality a 
more or less farcical anecdote of social life. The drama 
to which Shakespeare devoted his genius owed no sub- 
stantial debt to any of these dramatic experiments, and 
all were nearing extinction when he came of age. Such 
opportunities as he enjoyed of observing them in boy- 
hood left small impression on his dramatic work.^ 

^ Miracle and mystery plays were occasionally performed in provincial 
places till the close of the sixteenth century. The Warwickshire town 

90 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 9 1 

Although in its development Elizabethan drama as- 
similated an abundance of the national spirit, it can claim 
no strictly English parentage. It traces its 

■ ■ A- 4--U ^ ^ J A A ( The birth 

origin to the regular tragedy and comedy oi of Eliza- 
classical invention which flourished at Athens bethan 
and bred imitation at Rome. Elizabethan 
drama openly acknowledged its descent from Plautus 
and Seneca, types respectively of dramatic levity and 
dramatic seriousness, to which, according to Polonius, 
all drama, as he knew it, finally conformed.^ An Eng- 
lish adaptation of a comedy by Plautus and an English 
tragedy on the Senecan model begot the English strain 
of drama which Shakespeare glorified. The schoolmaster 
Nicholas Udall's farcical 'Ralph Roister Doister' (1540), 
a free English version of the Plautine comedy of 'Miles 
Gloriosus,' and the first attempt of two young barristers, 
Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, to give Senecan 
tragedy an English dress in their play of 'Gorboduc' 
(1561) are the starting-points of dramatic art in this 
country. The primal English comedy, which was in 
doggerel rhyme, was acted at Eton College, and the 
primal English tragedy, which was in blank verse, was 
produced in the Hall of the Middle Temple. It was in 
cultured circles that the new and fruitful dramatic move- 
ment drew its first breath. 

In the immediate succession of Elizabethan drama the 
foreign mould remained undisguised. During 1566 the 
examples set by 'Ralph Roister Doister' and ' Gorboduc' 
were followed in a second comedy and a second tragedy, 

of Coventry remained an active centre for this shape of dramatic energy 
until about 1575. At York, at Newcastle, at Chester, at Beverley, 
the representation of 'miracles' or 'mysteries' continued some years 
longer (E. K. Chambers, Medieval Stage; Pollard, English Miracle Plays, 
1909 ed., p. lix). But the sacred drama, in spite of some endeavours to 
continue its life, was reckoned by the Elizabethans a relic of the past. 
The morality play with its ethical scheme of personification, and the 
'interlude' with its crude farcical situations, were of later birth than 
the miracle or mystery, and although they were shorter-lived, absorbed 
much Uterary industry through the first stages of Shakespeare's career. 
^ Hamlet, 11. ii. 395-6. 



92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

both from the pen of George Gascoigne, who, after edu- 
cation at Cambridge, became a member of parHament 
and subsequently engaged in military service abroad ; 
both pieces were produced in the Hall of Gray's Inn. 
Gascoigne's comedy, the 'Supposes,' which was in prose 
and developed a slender romantic intrigue, was a trans- 
lation from the Italian of Ariosto, whose dramatic work 
was itself of classical inspiration. Gascoigne's tragedy 
of 'Jocasta,' which like 'Gorboduc' was in blank verse, 
betrayed more directly its classical affinities. It was 
an adaptation from the 'Phoenissas' of Euripides, and 
was scarcely the less faithful to its statuesque original 
because the English adapter depended on an intermediary 
Italian version by the well-known Lodovico Dolce. 

Subsequent dramatic experiments in England showed 
impatience of classical models in spite of the parental 
debt. The history of the nascent Elizabethan drama 
indeed shows the rapid elimination or drastic modification 
of many of the classical elements and their supersession 
by unprecedented features making for life and liberty 
in obedience to national sentiment. The fetters of the 
classical laws of unity — the triple unity of action, place, 
and time — were soon loosened or abandoned. The clas- 
sical chorus was discarded or was reduced to the slim 
proportions of a prologue or epilogue. Monologue was 
driven from its post of vantage. The violent action, 
which was relegated by classical drama to the descrip- 
tive speeches of messengers, was now first physically pre- 
sented on the stage. There was a fusing of comedy and 
tragedy — the two main branches of drama which, accord- 
ing to classical critics, were mutually exclusive. A new 
element of romance or sentiment was admitted into both 
branches and there ultimately emerged a new middle 
type of romantic drama. In all Elizabethan drama, 
save a sparse and fastidious fragment which sought the 
select suffrages of classical scholars, the divergences 
between classical and English methods grew very wide. 
But the literary traces of a classical origin were never 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 93 

wholly obliterated at any stage in the growth of the 
Elizabethan theatre. 

During Shakespeare's youth literary drama in England 
was struggling to rid itself of classical restraint, but it gave 
in the process no promise of the harvest which Amorphous 
his genius was to reap. During the first deveiop- 
eighteen years of Shakespeare's life (1564- "^^'^'^^• 
1582) there was no want of workers in drama of the new 
pattern. But their literary powers were modest, and 
they obeyed the call of an uncultured public taste. They 
suffered coarse buffooneries and blood-curdling sensa- 
tions to deform the classical principles which gave them 
their cue. The audience not merely applauded tragedy 
of blood or comedy or horseplay, but they encouraged 
the incongruous combination in one piece of the two 
kinds of crudity. Sir Philip Sidney accused the first 
Elizabethan dramatists of linking hornpipes with fu- 
nerals. Even Gascoigne yielded to the temptation of 
concocting a 'tragicall comedie.' Shakespeare subse- 
quently flung scorn on the unregenerate predilection 
for 'very tragical mirth.' ^ Yet the primordial incoher- 
ence did not deter him from yoking together comedy 
and tragedy within the confines of a single play. But he, 
more fortunate than his tutors, managed, while he defied 
classical law, to reconcile the revolutionary policy with 
the essential conditions of dramatic art. 

^ Theseus, when he reads the title of Bottom's play : 

A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus 
And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth. 

adds the comment 

Merry and tragical ! tedious and brief ! 
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow. 
How shall we find the concord of this discord ? 

Mids. Night's Dream, v. i. 57-60. 

A typical early tragicomedy by Thomas Preston was entitled 'A 
lamentable tragedy, mixed full of pleasant mirth conteyning the Life 
of Cambises King of Persia' (1569). Falstaff, when seeking to express 
himself grandiloquently, refers mockingly to the hero of this piece : 
'I must speak it in passion and I will do it in King Cambyses' vein,' 
I Henry 7F, 11. iv. 370. 



94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Another method of broadening the bases of drama was 
essayed in this early epoch. History was .enhsted in 
the service of the theatre. There, too, the first results 
were halting. The ' chronicle plays ' were mere pageants 
or processions of ill-connected episodes of history in 
Chronicle which drums and trumpets and the clatter of 
Plays. swords and cannon largely did duty for dra- 
matic speech or action. Here again Shakespeare ac- 
cepted new methods and proved by his example how 
genius might evoke order out of disorder and supplant 
violence by power. The EngKsh stage of Shakespeare's 
boyhood knew nothing of poetry, of coherent plot, of 
graphic characterisation, of the obligation of restraint. 
It was his glory to give such elements of drama an abid- 
ing place of predominance. 

In his early manhood — after 1582 — gleams of re- 
form lightened the dramatic horizon and helped him to 
A period of his goal. A period of purgation set in. At 
purgation, length the new forms of drama attracted the 
literary and poetic aspiration of men who had re- 
ceived at the universities sound classical training. 
From 1582 onwards John Lyly, an Oxford graduate, 
was framing fantastic comedies with lyric interludes 
out of stories of the Greek mythology, and his plays, 
which were capably interpreted by boy actors, won the 
special favour of Queen Elizabeth and her Court. Soon 
afterwards George Peele, another Oxford graduate, 
sought among other dramatic endeavours to fashion a 
play to some dramatic purpose out of the historic career 
of Edward I. Robert Greene, a Cambridge graduate, 
after an industrious career as a writer of prose romances, 
dramatised a few romantic tales, and he brought literary 
sentiment to quahfy the prevailing crudity. Thomas 
Kyd, who knew Latin and modern languages, though he 
enjoyed no academic training, slightly tempered the 
blood-curdling incident of tragedy by interpolating ro- 
mance, but he owed his vast popularity to extravagantly 
sensational situations and 'the swelling bombast of 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 95 

bragging blank verse.' Finally another graduate of 
Cambridge, Christopher Marlowe, signally challenged 
the faltering standard of popular tragedy, and in his 
stirring drama of ' Tamberlaine ' (1588) first proved be- 
yond question that the English language was capable 
of genuine tragic elevation. 

It was when the first reformers of the crude infant 
drama, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Marlowe, were 
busy with their experiments that Shakespeare shake- 
joined the ranks of English dramatists. As he speare's 
set out on his road he profited by the lessons fdiow- 
which these men were teaching. Kyd and workers. 
Greene left more or less definite impression on all Shake- 
speare's early efforts. But Lyly in comedy and Marlowe 
in tragedy may be reckoned the masters to whom he 
stood on the threshold of his career in the relation of 
disciple. With Marlowe there is evidence that he was 
for a brief season a working partner. 

Shakespeare shared with other men of genius that 
receptivity of mind which impelled them to assimilate 
much of the intellectual energy of their contemporaries.^ 
It was not only from the current drama of his youth 
that his mind sought some of its sustenance. The poetic 
fertility of his epoch outside the drama is barely rivalled 
in literary history, and thence he caught abundant 
suggestion. The lyric and narrative verse of Thomas 
Watson, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Sir Philip 
Sidney, and Thomas Lodge, were among the rills which 
fed the mighty river of his lyric invention. But in all 
directions he rapidly bettered the instruction of fellow- 
workers. Much of their work was unvalued ore, which 
he absorbed and transmuted into gold in the process. 

^ Ruskin forcibly defines the receptivity of genius in the following 
sentences : ' The greatest is he who has been of tenest aided ; and, if 
the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, 
it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution 
by the men of most original power, and that every day of their existence 
deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it. ' — • 
Modern Painters, iii. 362 (Appendix). 



96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

By the magic of his genius English drama was finally 
lifted to heights above the reach of any forerunner or 
contemporary. 

No Elizabethan actor achieved as a dramatist a posi- 
tion which was comparable with Shakespeare's. But in 
The actor his practice of combining the work of a play- 
dramatist, wright with the functions of a player, and 
later of a theatrical shareholder, there was noth- 
ing uncommon. The occupation of dramatist grew 
slowly into a professional calling. The development 
was a natural sequel of the organisation of actors on 
professional lines. To each Hcensed company there 
came to be attached two or three dramatic writers whose 
services often, but not invariably, were exclusively 
engaged. In many instances an acting member of 
the corporation undertook to satisfy a part, at any rate, 
of his colleagues' dramatic needs. George Peele, who 
was busy in the field of drama before Shakespeare en- 
tered it, was faithful to the double role of actor and 
dramatist through the greater part of his career. The 
first association of the dramatist Ben Jonson with the 
theatre was in an actor's capacity. Probably the most 
instructive parallel that could be drawn between the 
experiences of Shakespeare and those of a contemporary 
is offered by the biography of Thomas Heywood, the 
most voluminous playwright of the era, whom Charles 
Lamb generously dubbed 'a sort of prose Shakespeare.' 
There is ample evidence of the two men's personal ac- 
quaintance. For many years before 1600 Heywood 
served the Admiral's company as both actor and drama- 
tist. In 1600 he transferred himself to the Earl of 
Worcester's company, which on James I's accession was 
taken into the patronage of the royal consort Queen Anne 
of Denmark. Until her death in 16 19 he worked in- 
defatigably in that company's interest. He ultimately 
claimed to have had a hand in the writing of more than 
220 plays, although his literary labours were by no 
means confined to drama. In his elaborate 'Apology 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 97 

for Actors' (1612) he professed pride in his actor's 
vocation, from which, despite his other employments, 
he never dissociated himself.^ 

In all external regards Shakespeare's experience can 
be matched by that of his comrades. The outward 
features of his career as dramatist, no less than as actor, 
were cast in the current mould. In his proHfic industry, 
in his habit of seeking his fable in pre-existing literature, 
in his co-operation with other pens, in his avowals of 
deference to popular taste, he faithfully followed the 
common paths. It was solely in the supreme quality of 
his poetic and dramatic achievement that he parted com- 
pany with his fellows. 

The whole of Shakespeare's dramatic work was proba- 
bly begun and ended within two decades (1591-1611) 
between his twenty-seventh and forty-seventh 
year. If the works traditionally assigned to speare's 
him include some contributions from other dramatic 
pens, he was perhaps responsible, on the other 
hand, for portions of a few plays that are traditionally 
claimed for others. When the account is balanced 
Shakespeare must be credited with the production, 
during these twenty years, of a yearly average of two 

^ See pp. 112 n. 3, 269, 695. Numerous other instances could be 
given of the pursuit by men of letters of the theatrical profession. When 
Shakespeare first reached London, Robert Wilson was at once a leading 
dramatist and a leading actor. (See p. 134 n. i.) The poet Michael 
Drayton devoted much time to drama and was a leading shareholder 
in the Whitefriars theatre and in that capacity was involved in much 
litigation (New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. iii. pp. 269 seq.). William 
Rowley, an industrious playwright with whom there is reason for be- 
lieving that Shakespeare collaborated in the romantic drama of Pericles, 
long pursued simultaneously the histrionic and dramatic vocations. 
The most popular impersonator of youthful roles in Shakespeare's day, 
Nathaniel Field, made almost equal reputation in the two crafts ; while 
another boy actor, William Barkstead, co-operated in drama with 
John Marston and wrote narrative poems in the manner of Shakespeare, 
on whose ' art and wit ' he bestowed a poetic crown of laurel. Cf . Bark- 
stead's Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis (1607) : 

His song was worthie merrit {Shakespeare hee) : 
Lawrell is due to him, his art and wit 
Hath purchas'd it. 



98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

plays, nearly all of which belong to the supreme rank of 
Kterature. Three volumes of poems must be added to 
the total. Ben Jonson was often told by the players 
that 'whatsoever he penned he never blotted out [i.e. 
erased] a line.' The editors of the First Folio attested 
that 'what he thought he uttered with that easinesse 
that we have scarce received from him a blot in his 
papers.' Signs of hasty workmanship are not lacking, 
but they are few when it is considered how rapidly his 
numerous compositions came from his pen, and in the 
aggregate they are unimportant. 

By borrowing his plots in conformity with the general 
custom he to some extent economised his energy. The 
Hisbor- range of literature which he studied in his 
rowed scarch for tales whereon to build his dramas 

^°'^" was wide. He consulted not merely chronicles 

of English history (chiefly Ralph HoKnshed's) on which 
he based his English historical plays, but he was well 
read in the romances of Italy (mainly in French or Eng- 
lish translations), in the biographies of Plutarch, and in 
the romances and plays of English contemporaries. His 
Roman plays of 'Julius Caesar,' 'Antony and Cleopatra,' 
and 'Coriolanus' closely follow the narratives of the 
Greek biographer in the masculine English rendering of 
Sir Thomas North. Romances by his contemporaries, 
Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, suggested the fables 
respectively of 'As You Like It' and 'A Winter's Tale.' 
'All's Well that Ends Well' and 'Cymbeline' largely 
rest on foundations laid by Boccaccio in the fourteenth 
century. Novels by the sixteenth-century Italian, 
Bandello, are the ultimate sources of the stories of 
' Romeo and Juliet,' 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and 
'Twelfth Night.' The tales of 'Othello' and 'Measure 
for Measure' are traceable to an Italian novelist of his 
own era, Giraldi Cinthio. Belleforest's 'Histoires 
Tragiques,' a popular collection of French versions of 
the Italian romances of Bandello, was often in Shake- 
speare's hands. In treating of King John, Henry IV, 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 99 

Henry V, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, King 
Lear, and Hamlet, he worked over ground which fellow- 
dramatists had first fertilised. Most of the fables which 
he borrowed he transformed, and it was not probably 
with any conscious object of conserving his strength 
that he systematically levied loans on popular current 
literature. In his untiring assimilation of others' la- 
bours he betrayed something of the practical tempera- 
ment which is traceable in the conduct of the affairs of 
his later life. It was doubtless with the calculated aim 
of ministering to the public taste that he unceasingly 
adapted, as his genius dictated, themes which had al- 
ready, in the hands of inferior writers or dramatists, 
proved capable of arresting public attention. 

The professional playwrights sold their plays outright 
to the acting companies with which they were associated, 
and they retained no legal interest in them ^j^^ 
after the manuscript had passed into the revision 
hands of the theatrical manager.^ It was ° ^^^^' 
not unusual for the manager to invite extensive revision 
of a play at the hands of others than its author before it 
was produced on the stage, and again whenever it was 
revived. Shakespeare gained much early experience as 
a dramatist by revising or rewriting behind the scenes 
plays that had become the property of his manager. 
It is possible that some of his labours in this direction 
remain unidentified. In a few cases his alterations 
were possibly slight, but as a rule his fund of originality 
was too abundant to restrict him, when working as an 
adapter, to mere recension, and the results of most of 
his known labours in that capacity are entitled to 
rank among original compositions. 

^ One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert 
Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two 
companies. 'Ask the Queen's players,' his accuser bade him in Cuth- 
bert Cony-Catcher's Defence of Cony-Catching, 1592, 'if you sold them 
not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles [i.e. about 7/.], and when they 
were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral's men for 
as many more.' 



lOO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The determination of the exact order in which Shake- 
speare's plays were written depends largely on con- 
r^, , „„ lecture. External evidence is accessible in 

Chronology J i i i i i i 

of the only a tew cases, and, although always worthy 

P^^^" of the utmost consideration, is not invariably 

conclusive. The date of publication rarely indicates 
the date of composition. Only sixteen of the thirty- 
seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were 
pubHshed in his lifetime, and it is questionable whether 
any were published under his supervision.^ But subject- 
matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period 
in his career to which each play may be referred. In his 
early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy • appears in 
its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he de- 
picted life in its most complex involutions, and portrayed 
with masterly insight the subtle gradations of human 
sentiment and the mysterious workings of human pas- 
sion. Comedy and tragedy are gradually blended; 

^ The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in 
the belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts 
of the theatre, and Shakespeare would seem to have had no direct re- 
sponsibility for the publication of his plays. Professional opinion con- 
demned such playwrights as sought 'a double sale of their labours, first 
to the stage and after to the press' (Hey wood's Rape of Lucrece, 1638. 
Address to Reader). A very small proportion of plays acted in the 
reigns of Elizabeth and James I — some 600 out of a total of 3000 — 
consequently reached the printing press, and the bulk of them is now 
lost. In 1633 Hey wood wrote of 'some actors who think it against 
their peculiar profit to have them [i.e. plays] come into print.' {English 
Traveller pref.). But, in the absence of any law of copyright, publishers 
often contrived to defy the wishes of the author or owner of manuscripts. 
The poet and satirist George Wither, in his The Scholler's Purgatory 
[1625], which is the classical indictment of publishers of Shakespeare's 
day, charged them with habitually taking 'uppon them to publish 
bookes contrived altered and mangled at their owne pleasures without 
consent of the writers . . . and all foy their owne private lucre.' Many 
copies of a popular play were made for the actors or their patrons, and 
if one of these copies chanced to fall into a publisher's hands, it was 
issued without any endeavour to obtain either author's or manager's 
sanction. It was no uncommon practice, moreover, for a visitor to the 
theatre to take down a popular piece surreptitiously in shorthand (see 
p. 112 M. 2 infra), and to dispose to a publisher of his unauthorised tran- 
script, which was usually confused and only partially coherent. For 
fuller discussion of the conditions in which Shakespeare's plays Saw the 
light see bibliography, pp. 545 seq. infra. 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS lOl 

and his work finally developed a pathos such as could 
only come of ripe experience. Similarly the metre 
undergoes emancipation from the hampering restraints 
of fixed rule and becomes flexible enough to Metrical 
respond to every phase of human feeling. In ^^s^*^^- 
the blank verse of the early plays a pause is strictly ob- 
served at the close of almost every line, and rhyming 
couplets are frequent. Gradually the poet overrides such 
artificial restrictions ; rhyme largely disappears ; the pause 
is varied indefinitely ; iambic feet are replaced by trochees ; 
lines occasionally lack the orthodox number of feet ; extra 
syllables are, contrary to strict metrical law, introduced at 
the end of lines, and at times in the middle ; the last word 
of the line is often a weak and unemphatic conjunction or 
preposition.^ In his early work Shakespeare was chary 
of prose, and employed verse in scenes to The use 
which prose was better adapted. As his ^^ p™^^- 
experience grew he invariably clothed in prose the voice 
of broad humour or low comedy, the speech of mobs, 
clowns and fools, and the familiar and intimate con- 
versation of women.^ To the latest plays fantastic 

^ W. S. Walker in his Shakespeare's Versification, 1854, and Charles 
Bathurst in his Difference in Shakespeare's Versification at Different 
Periods of his Life, 1857, were the first to point out the general facts. 
Dr. Ingram's paper on 'The Weak Endings' in New Shakspere Society's 
Transactions (1874), vol. i. is of great value. Mr. Fleay's metrical tables, 
which first appeared in the same Society's Transactions (1874), and were 
re-issued by Dr. Furnivall in a somewhat revised form in his introduction 
to his Leopold Shakspere and elsewhere, give all the information possible. 

^ In Italy prose was the generally accepted instrument of the comedy 
of the Renaissance from an early period of the sixteenth century. This 
usage soon spread to France and somewhat later grew familiar in Eliza- 
bethan England. In 1566 Gascoigne rendered into English prose, Gli 
Suppositi, Ariosto's Italian prose comedy, and most of Lyly's 'Court 
Comedies' were wholly in prose. In his first experiment in comedy. 
Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare, apparently under the influence of 
foreign example, makes a liberal employment of prose, more than a 
third of the whole eschews verse. But in all other plays of early date 
Shakespeare uses prose sparingly; in two pieces, Richard II and King 
John, he avoids it altogether. In his mature work he first uses it on a 
large scale in the two parts of Henry IV, and it abounds in Henry V 
and in the three romantic comedies Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and 
Much Ado. The Merry Wives is almost entirely in prose, and there is 
a substantial amount in Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. 



I02 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and punning conceits which abound in early work are 
for the most denied admission. But, while Shake- 
speare's achievement from the beginning to the end of 
Ms career offers clearer evidence than that Of any other 
writer of genius of the steady and orderly growth of 
his poetic faculty, some allowance must be made for 
ebb and flow in the current of his artistic progress. 
Early work occasionally anticipates features that become 
habitual to late work, and late work at times embodies 
traits that are mainly identified with early work. No 
exclusive reliance in determining the precise chronology 
can be placed on the merely mechanical tests afforded by 
tables of metrical statistics. The chronological order can 
only be deduced with any confidence from a consideration 
of all the internal characteristics as well as the known 
external history of each play. The premisses are often 
vague and conflicting, and no chronology hitherto sug- 
gested receives at all points universal assent. 

There is no external evidence to prove that any piece 
in which Shakespeare had a hand was produced before 
'Love's . ^^^ spring of 1592. No play by him was 
Labour's published before 1597, and none bore his 
^^^' name on the title-page till 1598. But his 

first essays have been with confidence allotted to 1591. 
To 'Love's Labour's Lost' may reasonably be assigned 
priority in point of time of all Shakespeare's dramatic 
productions. In 1598 an amorous poet, writing in a 
melancholy mood, recorded a performance of the piece 
which he had witnessed long before.^ Internal evidence, 

In the great tragedies Julius Casar, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and 
Othello, there is comparatively Httle prose. In Hamlet, King Lear, 
Coriolanus, and Winter's Tale, the ratio of prose to verse again mounts 
high, but it falls perceptibly in Cymbeline and The Tempest. In the 
aggregate Shakespeare's prose writing is of substantial amount; fully 
a fourth part of his extant work takes that shape. 

^ Loves Labor Lost, I once did see a Play 

Ycleped so, so called to my paine . . . 

To every one (saue me) twas Comicall, 

Whilst Tragick like to me it did befaU. 

Each Actor plaid in cunning wise his part, 

But chiefly Those entrapt in Cupids snare. 
R[obert] T[ofte], Alba, 1598 (in Grosart's reprint 1880, p. 105). 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 103 

which alone offers any precise clue, proves that it was 
an early effort. But the general treatment suggests 
that the author had already Hved long enough in London 
to profit by study of a current mode of light comedy 
which was winning a fashionable vogue, while much of 
the subject-matter proves that he had already enjoyed 
extended opportunities of surveying London life and 
manners, such as were hardly open to him in the very 
first years of his settlement in the metropolis. 'Love's 
Labour's Lost' embodies keen observation of contem- 
porary Hfe in many ranks of society, both in town and 
country, while the speeches of the hero Biron clothe much 
sound philosophy in masterly rhetoric often charged with 
poetic fervour. Its slender plot stands almost alone 
among Shakespeare's plots in that it is not known to 
have been borrowed, and it stands quite alone in its 
sustained travesty of familiar traits and incidents of cur- 
rent social and political life. The names of the chief 
characters are drawn from the leaders in the civil war 
in France, which was in progress between 1589 and 1594, 
and was anxiously watched by the English public.^ 
Contemporary projects of academies for disciplining 
young men; fashions of speech and dress current in 
fashionable circles ; recent attempts on the part of EKza- 

^ The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is 
laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and 
LongaviUe, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters 
of the real King of Navarre (Biron's later career subsequently formed 
the subject of a double tragedy by Chapman, The Conspiracie and 
Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France, which was pro- 
duced in 1608). The name of the Lord Dumain in Love's Labour's Lost 
is a common anglicised version of that Due de Maine or Mayenne whose 
name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs 
in connexion with Navarre's movements that Shakespeare was led to 
number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name 
of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of a French ambassador who . 
was long popular in London; and, though he left England in 1583, 
he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Love's 
Labour's Lost was written. In Chapman's An Humourous Day's Mirth, 
1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of 
France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shake- 
speare's play, suggests much punning on the word 'mote.' As late as 



I04 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

beth's government to negotiate with the Tsar of Russia ; 
the inefficiency of rural constables and the pedantry of 
village schoolmasters and curates are all satirised with 
good humour. Holofernes, Shakespeare's Latinising 
pedagogue, is nearly akin to a stock character of the 
sixteenth-century comedy of France and Italy which 
was just obtaining an English vogue. 

In 'Love's Labour's Lost,' moreover, Shakespeare 
assimilates some new notes which EHzabethan comedy 
owed to the ingenuity of John Lyly, an active man of 
letters during most of Shakespeare's life. Lyly secured 
his first fame as early as 1580 by the publication of his 
didactic romance of 'Euphues,' which brought into 
fashion a mannered prose of strained antitheses and 
affected conceits.^ But hardly less originality was be- 

1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Cotistable, act ii. scene ii. line 215, 
wrote : 

Ho God ! Ho God ! thus did I revel it 
When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador. 

Armado, 'the fantastical Spaniard' who haunts Navarre's Court, and 
is dubbed by another courtier 'a phantasm, a Monarcho,' is a caricature 
of a half-crazed Spaniard known as 'fantastical Monarcho' who for 
many years hung about Elizabeth's Court, and was under the delusion 
that he owned the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death 
Thomas Churchyard wrote a poem called Fantasticall Monarcho's 
Epitaph, and mention is made of him in Reginald Scott's Discoverie of 
Witchcraft, 1584, p. 54. The name Armado was doubtless suggested 
by the expedition of 1588. Braggardino in Chapman's Blind Beggar of 
Alexandria, 1598, is drawn on the same lines. The scene {Lovers Labour's 
Lost, V. ii. 158 sqq.) in which the princess's lovers press their suit in the 
disguise of Russians follows a description of the reception by ladies of 
Elizabeth's Court in 1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London 
to seek a wife among the ladies of the English nobility for the Tsar 
(cf. Horsey's Travels, ed. E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc). For further in- 
dications of topics of the day treated in the play, see 'A New Study of 
"Love's Labour's Lost,'" by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. Oct. 
1880; and Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, pt. iii. p. 80 *. 
The attempt to detect in the schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the 
Italian teacher and lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see 
p. 15s n. 2). 

^ In later Ufe Shakespeare, in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly's Euphues 
Polonius's advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the 
moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the 
affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in 
1 Henry /F, 11. iv. 445 : ' For though the camomile, the more it is trodden 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS I05 

trayed by the writer in a series of eight comedies which 
came from his pen between 1580 and 1592, and were 
enthusiastically welcomed at Queen Elizabeth's Court, 
where they were rendered by the boy companies under 
the royal patronage.^ Lyly adapted to the stage themes 
of Greek mythology from the pages of Lucian, Apuleius, 
or Ovid, and he mingled with his classical fables scenes 
of low comedy which smacks of Plautus. The lan- 
guage is usually euphuistic. In only one play, 'The 
Woman in the Moone,' does he attempt blank verse; 
elsewhere his dramatic vehicle is exclusively prose. 
The most notable characteristics of Lyly's dramatic 
work are brisk artificial dialogues which glow with 
repartee and word-play, and musically turned lyrics. 
Such features were directly reflected in Shakespeare's 
first essay in coniedy. Many scenes and characters in 
'Love's Labour's- Lost' were obviously inspired by 
Lyly. Sir Tophas, 'a foolish braggart' in Lyly's play of 
'Endimion,' was the father of Shakespeare's character 
of Armado, while Armado's page-boy, Moth, is as filially 
related to Sir Tophas's page-boy, Epiton. The verbal 
encounters of Sir Tophas and Epiton in Lyly's 'En- 
dimion' practically reappear in the dialogues of 
Armado and Moth in Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's 
Lost.' Probably it was in conformity with Lyly's 
practice that Shakespeare denied the ornament of verse 
to fully a third part of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' while 
in introducing lyrics into his play Shakespeare again 
accepted Lyly's guidance. Shakespeare had at com- 
mand from his early days a fuller-blooded humanity 
than that which lay within Lyly's range. But Lyly's 

on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it 
wears.' Cf. Lyly's Works, ed. R. W. Bond (1902), i. 164-75. 

^ The titles of Lyly's chief comedies are (with dates of first publica- 
tion) : Alexander and Campaspe, 1584-', Sapho and Phao, 15&4; Endimion, 
1591; Gallatkea, isg2; Mydas, isg2; Mother Bombie, 1594; The Woman 
in the Moone (in blank verse), 1597; Love's Metamorphosis, 1601. The 
first six pieces were issued together in 1632 as ' Six Courte Comedies ... 
Written by the only rare poet of that time, the wittie, comicall, face- 
tiously quicke and unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts.' 



Io6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

influence long persisted in Shakespearean comedy." It is 
clearly visible in the succeeding plays of ' The Two Gen- 
tlemen of Verona' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' 

Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's Lost' was revised in 
1597, probably for a Christmas performance at Court. 
'A pleasant conceited comedie called Loues labors lost' 
was first published next year ' as it was presented before 
her Highness this last Christmas.' The pubHsher was 
Cuthbert Burbie, a liveryman of the Stationers' Company 
with a shop in Cornhill adjoining the Royal Exchange.^ 
On the title-page, which described the piece as 'newly 
corrected and augmented/ Shakespeare's name ('By 
W. Shakespere ') first appeared in print as that of author 
of a play. No license for the publication figures in 
the Stationers' Company's Register.^ The manuscript 
which the printer followed seems to have been legibly 
written, but it did not present the author's final correc- 
tions. Here and there the pubHshed text of 'Love's 
Labour's Lost' admits passages in two forms — the 
unrevised original draft and the revised version. The 
copyist failed to delete many unrevised lines, and his 
neglect, which the press-corrector did not repair, has 
left Shakespeare's first and second thoughts side by 
side. A graphic illustration is thus afforded of the 
flowing current of Shakespeare's art.^ 

Less gaiety characterised another comedy of the same 
date: 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' for the most 
'Two P^^t ^ lyrical romance of love and friendship. 

Gentlemen reflects Something of Lyly's influence in both 
its sentimental and its comic vein, but the 
construction echoes more distinctly notes coming from 

^ The printer was William White, of Cow Lane, near the Holborn 
Conduit. 

^ Love's Labour's Lost was first mentioned in the Stationers' Register 
on Jan. 22, 1606-7, when the publisher Burbie transferred his right in 
the piece to Nicholas Ling, who made the title over to another stationer 
John Smethwick on Nov. 19, 1607. No quarto of the play was published 
by Smethwick till 1631. 

^Cf. Love's Labour's Lost, iv. iii. 11. 299-301 and 320-333; ib. 11. 
302-304 and 350-353; V. ii. 11. 827-832 and 847-881. 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 107 

the South of Europe — from Italy and Spain. The 
perplexed fortunes of the two pairs of youthful lovers 
and the masculine disguise of one of the heroines are 
reminiscent of Italian or Spanish ingenuity. Shake- 
speare had clearly studied 'The pleasaunt and fine con- 
ceited Comedie of Two Italian Gentlemen,' a crude 
comedy of double intrigue penned in undramatic rhyme, 
which was issued anonymously in London in 1584, and 
was adapted from a somewhat coarse Italian piece of 
European repute.^ The eager pursuit by Shakespeare's 
Julia in a man's disguise of her wayward lover Proteus 
suggests, at the same time, indebtedness to the Spanish 
story of 'The Shepardess FeHsmena,' who endeavoured 
to conceal her sex in her pursuit of her fickle lover Don 
Felix. The tale of Felismena forms part of the Spanish 
pastoral romance 'Diana,' by George de Montemayor, 
which long enjoyed popularity in England.^ The ' history 
of Felix and Philomena,' a lost piece which was acted at 
Court in 1584, was apparently a first attempt to drama- 
tise Montemayor's story, and it may have given Shake- 
speare one of his cues.^ 

^ Fidele and Forhmio, The Two Italian Gentlemen, which was edited 
for the Malone Society by W. W. Greg in 1910, is of uncertain author- 
ship. CoUier ascribed it to Anthony Munday, but some passages seem 
to have come from the youthful pen of George Chapman (see England's 
Parnassus, ed. by Charles Crawford, 1913, pp. 517 seq. ; Malone Soc. 
Collections, 1909, vol. i. pp. 218 seq.). The Italian original called II 
Fedele was by Luigi Pasqualigo, and was printed at Venice in 1576. A 
French version, Le Fidelle, by Pierre de Larivey, a popular French 
dramatist, appeared in 1579, and near the same date a Latin rendering 
was undertaken by the English classicist, Abraham Fraunce. Fraunce's 
work was first printed from the manuscript at Penshurst by Prof. G. C. 
Moore Smith in Bang's Materialien, Band XIV., Louvain, 1906, under 
the title Victoria, the name of the heroine. 

^ No complete English translation of Montemayor's romance was 
published before that of Bartholomew Yonge in 1598, but a manuscript 
version by Thomas Wilson, which was dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, 
the Earl of Southampton, in 1596, possibly circulated earher (Brit. Mus. 
Addit. MSS. 18638). 

^ Some verses from Diana were translated by Sir Philip Sidney and 
were printed with his poems as early as 1591. Other current Italian 
fiction, which also anticipated the masculine disguise of Shakespeare's 
Julia, was likewise accessible in an English garb. The industrious 
soldier-author Barnabe Riche drew a cognate story ('Apolonius and 



I08 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Many of Lyly's idiosyncrasies readily adapted them- 
selves to the treatment of the foreign fable. Trifling and 
irritating conceits abound and tend to an atmosphere of 
artificiality; but passages of high poetic spirit are not 
wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and 
Speed — • the precursors of a long line of whimsical 
serving-men — overflow with a farcical drollery which 
improves on Lyly's verbal smartness. The 'Two 
Gentlemen' was not pubHshed in Shakespeare's life- 
time ; it first appeared in the Folio of 1623, after having, 
in all probability, undergone some revision.^ 

Shakespeare next tried his hand, in the 'Comedy of 
Errors' (commonly known at the time as 'Errors'), at 
'Comedy boisterous farce. The comic gusto is very 
of Errors.' slightly relieved by romantic or poetic speech, 
but a fine note of sober and restrained comedy is 
struck in the scene where the abbess rebukes the 
shrewish wife Adriana for her persecution of her 
husband (v. i.). 'The Comedy of Errors,' like 'The 
Two Gentlemen,' was first published in 1623. Again, 
too, as in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' allusion was made 
to the civil war in France. France was described as 
'making war against her heir' (in. ii. 125) — an allusion 
which assigns the composition of the piece to 1591. 
Shakespeare's farce, which is by far the shortest of all 
his dramas, may have been founded on a play, no longer 
extant, called 'The Historic of Error,' which was acted 
in 1576 at Hampton Court. In theme Shakespeare's 
piece resembles the 'Menaechmi' of Plautus, and treats 
of mistakes of identity arising from the likeness of 

Silla') from an Italian source, Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi, 1565, 
pt. I, isth day, Novel 8. Riche's story is the second tale in his 'Fare- 
well to Militarie Profession conteining verie pleasaunt discourses lit 
for a peaceable tyme,' 1581. A more famous Italian novelist, Bandello, 
had previously employed the like theme of a girl in man's disguise to 
more satisfying purpose in his Novelle (1554; Pt. II. Novel 36). _ Under 
Bandello's guidance Shakespeare treated the topic again and with finer 
insight in Twelfth Night, his masterpiece of romantic comedy (see pp. 
327-8 infra). 

^ Fleay, Life, pp. 188 seq. 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 109 

twin-born children, although Shakespeare adds to 
Plautus's single pair of identical twins a second couple 
of serving men. The scene in Shakespeare's play (act 
III. sc. i.) in which Antipholus of Ephesus is shut out of 
his own house, while his indistinguishable brother is 
entertained at dinner within by his wife who mistakes 
him for her husband, recalls an episode in the 
'Amphitruo' of Plautus. Shakespeare doubtless had di- 
rect recourse to Plautus as well as to the old play. He 
had read the Latin dramatist at school. There is only 
a bare possibiHty that he had an opportunity of reading 
Plautus in English when 'The Comedy of Errors' was 
written in 1591. The earliest translation of the 'Me- 
naechmi ' was not Hcensed for publication before June 10, 
1594, and was not published until the following year. 
No translation of any other play of Plautus appeared in 
print before. On the other hand, it was stated in the 
preface to this first pubHshed translation of the 
'Menaechmi' that the translator, W. W., doubtless 
Wilham Warner, a veteran of the Elizabethan world of 
letters, had some time previously 'Englished' that and 
'divers' others of Plautus's comedies, and had circulated 
them in manuscript 'for the use of and dehght of his 
private friends, who, in Plautus's own words, are not 
able to understand them.' 

Each of these three plays — 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 
'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and 'The Comedy of 
Errors' — gave promise of a dramatic capacity 'Romeo 
out of the common way; yet none can be and Juliet.' 
with certainty pronounced to be beyond the ability 
of other men. It was not until he produced 'Romeo 
and Juliet,' his first tragedy, that Shakespeare proved 
himself the possessor of a poetic instinct and a dramatic 
insight of unprecedented quality. Signs of study of the 
contemporary native drama and of other home-born 
Hterature are not wanting in this triumph of distinctive 
genius. To Marlowe, Shakespeare's only English pred- 
ecessor in poetic and passionate tragedy, some rhetori- 



no WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

cal circumlocutions and much metrical dexterity are 
undisguised debts. But the pathos which gave 
'Romeo and JuHet' its nobility lay beyond Marlowe's 
dramatic scope or sympathy. Where Shakespeare, in 
his early efforts, manipulated themes of closer affinity 
with those of Marlowe, the influence of the master 
penetrates deeper. In 'Romeo and Juliet' Shakespeare 
turned to rare account a tragic romance of ItaHan origin, 
which was already popular in English versions, and was 
an accepted theme of drama throughout Western Eu- 
rope.^ Arthur Broke, who in 1562 rendered the story 
into English verse from a French rendering of Bandello's 
standard Italian narrative, mentions in his ' Address to 
the Reader ' that he had seen ' the same argument lately 
set forth on stage with more commendation' than he 
could 'look for,' but no tangible proof of this statement 
has yet come to light. A second English author, Wil- 
liam Painter, greatly extended the English vogue of 

^ The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance of 
Anthia and Abrocomas by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second 
century, seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by 
Masuccio, 'the NeapoHtan Boccaccio,' in his Novellino (No. xxxiii. : cf. 
W. G. Waters's translation, ii. 155-65). It was adapted from Masuccio 
by Luigi da Porto in his novel, La Giulietta, 1535, and by Bandello in 
his Novelle, 1554, pt. ii. No. ix. Bandello's version became classical; 
it was translated into French in the Histoires Tragiqties of Frangois de 
Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional 
collaborator with BeUeforest. The English writers Broke and Painter 
are both disciples of Boaistuau. Near the same time that Shakespeare 
was writing Romeo and Juliet, the Italian story was dramatised, chiefly 
with Bandello's help, by Italian, French, and Spanish writers. The 
blind dramatist Luigi Groto published at Venice in 1583 La Hadriana, 
tragedia nova, which tells of Romeo and Juliet under other names and 
closely anticipates many passages of Shakespeare's play. (Cf. Originals 
and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Soc, pp. xxi seq.) 
Meanwhile a French version (now lost) of Bandello's Romeo and Juliet, 
by C6me de la Gambe, called ' Chateau vieux,' a professional actor and 
groom of the chamber to Henri III, was performed at the French Court 
in 1580. (See the present writer's French Renaissance in England, 1910, 
pp. 439-440.) Subsequently Lope de Vega dramatised the tale in his 
Spanish play called Castelvines y Monteses (i.e. Capulets and Montagus) . 
For an analysis of Lope's play, which ends happily, see Variorum Shake- 
speare, 1 82 1, xxi. 451-60. Lope's play appeared in an inaccurate Eng- 
lish translation in 1770, and was rendered literally by Mr. F. W. Cosens 
in a privately printed volume in 1869. 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS ill 

the legend by publishing in 1567, in his anthology of 
fiction called 'The Palace of Pleasure,' a prose para- 
phrase of the same French version as Broke employed. 
Shakespeare followed Broke's verse more closely than 
Painter's prose, although he studied both. At the same 
time he impregnated the familiar story with a wholly 
original poetic fervour, and relieved the tragic intensity 
by developing the humour of Mercutio, and by investing 
with an entirely new and comic significance the character 
of the Nurse. ^ Dryden was of opinion that, 'in his 
Mercutio, Shakespeare showed the best of his skill' 
as a deHneator of 'gentlemen,' and the critic, who was 
writing in 1672, imputed to Shakespeare the remark 
'that he was forced to kill him [Mercutio] in the third 
act to prevent being killed by him.' ^ The subordinate 
comic character of Peter, the nurse's serving-man, en- 
joyed the advantage of being interpreted on the pro- 
duction of the piece by William Kemp, a leading come- 
dian of the day.^ Yet it is the characterisation of hero 
and heroine on which Shakespeare focussed his strength. 
The ecstasy of youthful passion is portrayed by Shake- 
speare in language of the highest lyric beauty, and al- 
though he often yields to the current predilection for 
quibbles and conceits, 'Romeo and Juliet,' as a tragic 
poem on the theme of love, has no rival in any literature. 
If the Nurse's remark, "Tis since the earthquake now 
eleven years' (i. iii. 23), be taken literally, the composi- 
tion of the play must at least have begun in 1591, for 

^ Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere 
Society. 

^ Dryden's Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, i. 174. Dryden continued his 
comments thus on Shakespeare's alleged confession : ' But, for my part, 
I cannot find he [Mercutio] was so dangerous a person : I see nothing 
in him but what was so exceedingly harmless, that he might have lived 
to the end of the play, and died in his bed, without offence to any 
man.' 

^ By a copyist's error Kemp's name is substituted for Peter's in the 
second and third quartos of the play (iv. v. 100). A like error of tran- 
scription in the text of Much Ado about Nothing (Act 11. Sc. ii.) establishes 
the fact that Kemp subsequently created the part of Dogberry. 



112 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

no earthquake in the sixteenth century was experienced 
in England after 1580. A few paralleHsms with Daniel's 
' Complain te of Rosamond' suggest that Shakespeare 
read that poem before completing his play. Daniel's 
work was published in 1592, and it is probable that 
Shakespeare completed his piece early that year. The 
popularity of the tragedy was unquestioned from the 
first, and young lovers were for a generation commonly 
credited with speaking 'naught but pure Juliet and 
Romeo. ' ^ 

The tragedy underwent some revision after its first 
production.^ The earhest edition appeared in 1597 
annonymously and surreptitiously. The title-page ran: 
'An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and luliet. 
As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid pub- 
liquely by the right honourable the L[ord] of Hunsdon 
his seruants.' The printer and pubHsher, John Danter, a 
very notorious trader in books, of Hosier Lane, near Hol- 
born Conduit, had acquired an unauthorised transcript 
which had doubtless been prepared from a shorthand 
report.^ The reporter filled gaps in his imperfect notes 

^ Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), Satyre 10. 

^ Cf. Parallel Texts, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society; Fleay, 
Life, pp. 191 seq. 

3 Danter first obtained notoriety in 1593 as the publisher of Thomas 
Nashe's scurrilous attacks on the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey. 
Subsequently he enjoyed the unique distinction among Elizabethan 
stationers of being introduced under his own name in the dramatis per- 
soncE of an acted play of the period. 'Danter the printer' figured as a 
trafficker in the licentious products of academic youth in the academic 
play of The Returne from Parnassus, act i. sc. iii (1600?). Besides 
Romeo and Juliet, Danter published Titus Andronicus (early in 1594; 
see p. 132). He died in 1597 or 1598. The evU practice of publishing 
crude shorthand reports of plays, from which Shakespeare was to suiler 
frequently, is capable of much independent illustration. The dramatist 
Thomas Hey wood, who began his long career as dramatist before 1600, 
complained that some of his pieces accidentally fell into the printer's 
hands, and then 'so corrupt and mangled, copied only by the ear, that 
I have been as unable to know them as ashamed to challenge them' 
{Rape of Lucrece, 1638, address). Similarly Heywood included in his 
Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, 1637 (pp. 248-9) a prologue for the 
revival of an old play of his concerning Queen Elizabeth, called 'If 
you know not me, you know nobody,' which he had lately revised for 



FIRST DRAMATIC EFFORTS 1 13 

with unwieldy descriptive stage directions of his own 
devising. A second quarto — ' The most excellent and 
lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, newly cor- 
rected, augmented, and amended ; As it hath bene 
sundry times publiquely acted by the right honourable 
the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants ' — was published, 
from an authentic stage version, in 1599, by a stationer 
of higher reputation, Cuthbert Burbie of Cornhill.^ In 
Burbie's edition the tragedy first took coherent shape. 
Ten years later a reprint of Burbie's quarto introduced 
further improvements ('as it hath been sundrie times 
publiquely acted by the Kings Maiesties Seruants at 

acting purposes. Nathaniel Butter had published the first and second 
editions of the piece in 1605 and 1608, and Thomas Pavier the third in 
1610. In a prose note preceding the new prologue the author denounced 
the printed edition as 'the most corrupted copy, which was published 
without his consent.' In the prologue itself, Heywood declared that 
the piece had 011 its original production on the stage pleased the audience : 

So much that some by stenography drew 
The plot, put it in print, scarce one word true. 

Sermons and lectures were frequently described on their title-page as 
'taken by characterie' (cf. Stephen Egerton's Lecture 1598, and Ser- 
mons of Henry Smith, 1590 and 1591). The popular system of Eliza- 
bethan shorthand was that devised by Timothy Bright in his 'Char- 
acterie : An arte of shorte scripte, and secrete writing by character,' 
1588. In 1590 Peter Bales devoted the opening section of his 'Writing 
Schoolmaster' to the 'Arte of Brachygraphy.' In 161 2 Sir George Buc, 
in his 'Third Vniversitie of England' (appended to Stow's Chronicle), 
wrote of 'the much- to-be-regarded Art of Brachygraphy' (chap, xxxix.), 
that it 'is an art newly discovered or newly recovered, and is of very 
good and necessary use, being well and honestly exercised, for, by the 
meanes and helpe thereof, they which know it can readily take a Ser- 
mon, Oration, Play, or any long speech, as they are spoke, dictated, 
acted, and uttered in the instant.' 

^ This quarto was printed for Burbie by Thomas Creede at the Katha- 
rine Wheel in Thames Street. Burbie had a year earlier issued the 
quarto of Love's Labour's Lost. He had no other association with 
Shakespeare's work. The Stationers' Company's Register contains no 
license for the issue of either Banter's or Burbie's quarto of Romeo and 
Jtdiet. The earliest mention of the piece in the Stationers' Register is 
under date January 22, 1606-7, when Burbie assigned his rights in that 
tragedy, as well as in Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew, 
to the stationer Nicholas Ling ; but Ling transferred his title on Novem- 
ber 19, 1607, to John Smethwick, who was responsible for the third 
quarto of Romeo and Juliet of 1609. 



114 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the Globe'), and that volume, which twice re-appeared 
in quarto — without date and in 1637 — was the basis 
of the standard text of the First Folio. The prolonged 
series of quarto editions show that 'Romeo and Juliet' 
fully retained its popularity throughout Shakespeare's 
generation. 



VIII 

PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 

Three pieces with which Shakespeare's early activities 
were associated reveal him as an adapter of plays by 
other hands. Though they lack the interest shake- 
attaching to his unaided work, they throw in- speareas 
valuable light on some of his early methods of others' 
composition and on his early relations with p^^^^- 
other dramatists. Proofs are offered of Shakespeare's 
personal co-operation with his great forerunner Marlowe, 
and the manner of influence which Marlowe's example 
exerted on him is precisely indicated. Shakespeare, 
moreover, now experimented for the first time with the 
dramatisation of his country's history. That special 
branch of drama was rousing immense enthusiasm in 
Elizabethan audiences, and Shakespeare's first venture 
into the historical field enjoyed a liberal share of the 
popular applause. 

On March 3, 1 591-2, 'Henry VI,' described as a 
'new' or reconstructed piece, was acted at the Rose 
Theatre by Lord Strange's men. It was 'Henry 
no doubt the play subsequently known as ^^■' 
Shakespeare's 'The First Part of Henry VI,' which pre- 
sented the war in France and the factious quarrels of 
the nobility at home from the funeral of King Henry 
V (in 1422) to the humiliating treaty of marriage be- 
tween his degenerate son. King Henry VI, with Margaret 
of Anjou (in 1445). O^i its production the piece, owing 
to its martial note, won a popular triumph, and the 
unusual number of fifteen performances followed within 
the year.^ 'How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the 

^ Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 13 et passim; ii. 152, 338. The last 
recorded performance was on Jan. 31, 1593. 



Il6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

terror of the French),' wrote Thomas Nashe, the satiric 
pamphleteer, in his 'Pierce Pennilesse' (1592, Kcensed 
August 8), with reference to the striking scenes of 
Talbot's death (act iv. sc. vi. and viii.), 'to thinke that 
after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee 
should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones 
newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand specta- 
tors at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian 
that represents his person, imagine they behold him 
fresh bleeding ! ' There is no categorical record of the 
production of a second piece in continuation of the theme, 
but indirect evidence planly attests that such a play 
was quickly staged. A third piece, treating of the 
concluding incidents of Henry VI's reign, attracted much 
attention in the theatre early in the autumn of the same 
year (1592). 

The applause attending the completion of this histori- 
cal trilogy caused bewilderment in the theatrical pro- 
Greene's fession. Older dramatists awoke to the fact 
attack. i]^g^i their popularity was endangered by a 
young stranger who had set up his tent in their 
midst, and was challenging the supremacy of the camp. 
A rancorous protest was uttered without delay. Late 
in the summer of 1592 Robert Greene lay, after a reck- 
less life, on a pauper's deathbed. His last hours were 
spent in preparing for the press a miscellany of eu- 
phuistic fiction which he entitled ' Greens Groatsworth 
of Wit bought with a Milhon of Repentaunce.' Tow- 
ards the close the sardonic author introduced a letter 
addressed to 'those gentlemen his quondam acquaint- 
ance that spend their wits in making plays.' Here he 
warned three nameless literary friends who may best 
be identified with Peele, Marlowe, and Nashe, against 
putting faith in actors whom he defined as 'buckram 
gentlemen, painted monsters, puppets who speak from 
our mouths, antics garnished in our colours.' Such 
men were especially charged with defying their just 
obHgations to dramatic authors. But Greene's venom 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 117 

was chiefly excited by a single member of the acting 
fraternity. 'There is/ he continued 'an upstart Crow, 
beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart 
wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to 
bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you ; and 
being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his owne con- 
ceit, the onely Shake-scene in a countrie. . . . Never 
more acquaint [those apes] with your admired inven- 
tions, for it is pittie men of such rare wits should be 
subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.' The 
'only Shake-scene' is a punning attack on Shakespeare. 
The tirade is an explosion of resentment on the part of a 
disappointed senior dramatist at the energy of a young 
actor — the theatre's factotum — in trespassing on the 
playwriter's domain. The 'upstart crow' had revised 
the dramatic work of his seniors without adequate 
acknowledgment but with such masterly effect as to 
imperil their future hold on the esteem of manager and 
playgoer. When Greene mockingly cites as a specimen 
of his 'only Shake-scene's' capacity the line 'Tyger's 
heart wrapt in a players hide' he travesties the words 
'Oh Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide' ^ from the 
third piece in the trilogy of Shakespeare's 'Henry VI' 
(i. iv. 137). It may be inferred that Greene was espe- 
cially angered by Shakespeare's revision of this piece 
in devising which he originally had a part.^ 

The sour critic died on September 3, 1592, as soon 
as he laid down his splenetic pen. But Shakespeare's 
amiability of character and versatile ambition had 

^ These words which figure in one of the most spirited outbursts 
in the play — the Duke of York's savage denunciation of Queen Margaret 
— were first printed in 1595 in the earliest known draft of the drama 
The True Tragedie of the Duke of York (see p. 120 infra). 

2 Greene's complaint that he was robbed of his due fame by literary 
plagiaries, among whom he gave Shakespeare the first place, was em- 
phatically repeated by an admiring elegist : 

Greene gaue the groxind to all that wrote vpon him. 
Nay more the men that so eclipst his fame 
Purloynde his Plumes ; can they deny the same? 

{Greenes Funeralls, by R. B. 1594, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1911, Sonnet IX.) 



Il8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

already won him admirers, and his success excited 
the sympathetic regard of colleagues more kindly than 
Chettie's Greene. At any rate the dying man had clearly 
apology. miscalculated Marlowe's sentiment. Marlowe 
was already working with Shakespeare, and showed 
readiness to continue the partnership. In December 
1592, moreover, Greene's publisher, Henry Chettle, who 
was himself about to turn dramatist, prefixed an apology 
for Greene's attack on the young actor to his 'Kind 
Hartes Dreame,' a tract describing contemporary phases 
of social life. He reproached himself with failing to 
soften Greene's phraseology before committing it to 
the press. 'I am as sory,' Chettle wrote, 'as if the 
original fault had beene my fault, because myselfe 
have scene his [i.e. Shakespeare's] demeanour no lesse 
civill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides 
divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, 
which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in 
writing that aprooves his art.' It is obvious that 
Shakespeare at the date of Chettie's apology was 
winning a high reputation alike as actor, man, and 
writer. 

The first of the three plays dealing with the reign of 
'Henry VI' was originally published in 1623, in the 
collected edition of Shakespeare's works. The actor- 
editors of the First Folio here accepted a veteran stage 
tradition of its authorship. The second and third plays 
were previous to the publication of the First Folio each 
printed thrice in quarto volumes in a form very different 
from that which they assumed long after when they 
followed the first part in the FoHo. Two editions of 
the second and third parts of 'Henry VI' came forth 
without any author's name ; but the third separate issue 
boldly ascribed both to Shakespeare's pen. The attri- 
bution has justification but needs qualifying. Criticism 
has proved beyond doubt that in the three parts of 
'Henry VI' Shakespeare with varying energy revised 
and expanded other men's work. In the first part 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 119 

there may be small trace of his pen, but in the second 
and third evidence of his handiwork abounds. 

At the most generous computation no more than 300 
out of the 2600 lines of the 'First Part' bear the impress 
of Shakespeare's style. It may be doubted 
whether he can be safely credited with aught speare's 
beyond the scene in the Temple Gardens, contribu- 
where white and red roses are plucked as 'The First 
emblems by the rival political parties (act 11. Henn^Vi' 
sc. iv.), and Talbot's speeches on the battle- 
field (act IV. sc. v.-vii.), to the enthusiastic recep- 
tion of which on the stage Nashe bears witness. It 
may be, however, that the dying speech of Mortimer 
(act II. sc. v.) and the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk 
(act v. sc. iii.) also bear marks of Shakespeare's vivid 
power. The Hfeless beat of the verse and the crudity 
of the language conclusively deprive Shakespeare of all 
responsibility for the brutal scenes travestying the story 
of Joan of Arc which the author of the first part of ' Henry 
VI ' somewhat slavishly drew from Holinshed. The clas- 
sical allusions throughout the piece are far more numer- 
ous and recondite than Shakespeare was in the habit of 
employing. Holinshed's ' Chronicle ' supplies the histori- 
cal basis for all the pieces, but the playwright defies 
historic chronology in the 'First Part' with a callous 
freedom exceeding anything in Shakespeare's fully 
accredited history work. 

The second part of Henry VI's reign, which carried 
on the story from the coronation of Queen Margaret to 
the initial campaign of the Wars of the Roses, pjj.^^ ^^^_ 
was first published anonymously in 1594 from tionsof 
a rough stage copy by Thomas Millington, a and^Third 
stationer of Cornhill. A license for the pub- Part of 
Hcation was granted him on March 12, ^^^^ 
1593-4, and the volume, which was printed by Thomas 
Creede of Thames Street, bore on its title-page the 
rambling description 'The first part of the Contention 
betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster 



I20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

with the death of the good Duke Humphrey : and the 
banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolk, and the 
Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, 
with the notable Rebellion of Jacke Cade ; and the 
Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the crowne.' 

The third part of Henry VI's reign, which continues 
the tale to the sovereign's final dethronement and death, 
was first printed under a different designation with 
greater care next year by Peter Short of Bread Street 
Hill, and was published, as in the case of its predecessor, 
by MiUington. This quarto bore the title 'The True 
Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, and the death of 
good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention 
betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke as it 
was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the 
Earle of Pembroke his seruants. ' ^ The first part of the 
trilogy had been acted by Lord Strange's company with 
which Shakespeare was associated, and the interpreta- 
tion of the third and last instalment by Lord Pembroke's 
men was only a temporary deviation from normal practice. 

In their earliest extant shape, the two continuations 
of the First Part of 'Henry VI' — ^ the 'Contention' 
and the ' True Tragedie ' — show liberal traces of 
Shakespeare's revising pen. The foundations were 

^ Millington reissued both The Contention and True Tragedie in 1600, 
the former being then printed for him by Valentine Simmes (or Sims), 
the latter by William White. On April 19, 1602, Millington made 
over to another publisher, Thomas Pavier, his interest in 'The first 
and second parts of Henry the vj'^ ii bookes' (Arber, iii. 304). This 
entry would seem at a first glance to imply that the first as well as the 
second part of Shakespeare's Henry VI were prepared for separate pub- 
lication in 1602, but no extant edition of any part of Henry VI belongs 
to that year. It is more probable that Pavier's reference is to The 
Contention and True Tragedie — early drafts respectively of Parts II 
and III of Henry VI. Pavier, to whom Millington assigned the two 
parts of Henry the vj^^ in 1602, published a new edition of The Conten- 
tion with the True Tragedie in 1619, when the title-page bore the words 
'newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shake-speare, 
Gent.' This is the earliest attribution of the two plays to Shakespeare, 
but Pavier the publisher, although he had some warrant in this case, 
is rarely a trustworthy witness, for he had little scruple in attaching 
Shakespeare's name to plays by other pens (see p. 262 infra). 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 121 

clearly laid throughout by another hand, but Shakespeare 
is responsible for much of the superstructure. The 
humours of Jack Cade in 'The Contention' can owe 
their savour to him alone. Queen Margaret's simple 
words in the 'True Tragedie,' when in the ecstasy of 
grief she cries out to the murderers of her son ' You have 
no children,' have a poignancy of which few but Shake- 
speare had the secret. Twice in later plays did he repeat 
the same passionate rebuke in cognate circumstances.-^ 

Shakespeare may be absolved of all responsibihty for 
the original drafts of the three pieces. Those drafts have 
not survived. It was in revised versions that the plays 
were put on the stage in 1592, and the text of the second 
and third parts which the actors then presented is extant 
in the printed editions of 'The Contention' and 'The 
True Tragedie.' But much further reconstruction en- 
gaged Shakespeare's energy before he left the theme. 
With a view to a subsequent revival, Shakespeare's 
services were enlisted in a fresh recension, at any rate 
of the second and third parts, involving a great expan- 
sion. 'The Contention' was thoroughly overhauled, 
and was converted into what was entitled in the Folio 
'The Second Part of Henry VI.' There more than 500 
lines keep their old form : 840 lines are more or less 
altered ; some 700 of the earlier lines are dropped al- 
together, and are replaced by 1700 new lines. 'The 
True Tragedie,' which became 'The Third Part of 
Henry VI ' of the Folio, was less drastically handled ; 
no part of the old piece is here abandoned ; some 1000 
lines are retained unaltered, and some 900 are recast. 
But a thousand fresh lines make their appearance. Each 
of the Folio pieces is longer than its forerunner by at 
least a third. The 2000 lines of the old pieces grow into 
the 3000 of the new.^ 

^ Cf. Constance's bitter cry to the papal legate in King John 'He 
talks to me that never had a son' (iii. iv. 91) ; and Macduff's reproach 
'He has no children' {Macbeth, iv. iii. 216). 

2 C/. Fleay, Life, pp. 235 seq. ; Trans. New Shakspere Soc, 1876, 
pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne, Study, pp. 51 seq. 



122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Of the two successive revisions of the primal 'Henry 
VI' in which Shakespeare had a hand the first may be 
Shake- dated in 1592 and the second in 1593. That 
speare's Shakespeare in both revisions shared the work 
coadjutors, ^j^-j^ another is clear from the internal evidence, 
and the identity of his coadjutor may be inferred with 
reasonable confidence. The theory that Robert Greene, 
with George Peele's co-operation, produced the original 
draft of the three parts of 'Henry VI,' which Shake- 
speare twice helped to recast, can alone account for 
Greene's indignant denunciation of Shakespeare as 'an 
upstart crow, beautified with the feathers' of himself 
and his fellow dramatists. Greene and Peele were classi- 
cal scholars to whom there would come naturally such 
unfamiliar classical allusions as figure in all the pieces. 
The lack of historic sense which is characteristic of 
Greene's romantic tendencies may well account for the 
historical errors which set ' The First Part of Henry VI ' 
in a special category of ineptitude. Peele elsewhere, in 
his dramatic presentation of the career of Edward I, 
libels, under the sway of anti-Spanish prejudice, the 
memory of Queen Eleanor of Castile ; he would have 
found nothing uncongenial in the work of vilifying Joan 
of Arc. Signs are not wanting that it was Marlowe, the 
greatest of his predecessors, whom Shakespeare joined 
in the first revision which brought to birth ' The Conten- 
tion' and the 'True Tragedie.' There the fine writing, 
the over-elaboration of commonplace ideas, the tendency 
to rant in language of some dignity, are sure indications 
of Marlowe's hand. In the second and last recension 
there are also occasional signs of Marlowe's handi- 
work,^ but most of the new passages are indubitably from 

^ Few will question that among the new lines in the 'Second Part' 
Marlowe is responsible for such as these (iv. i. 1-4) : 

The gaudy blabbing and remorseful day 

Is crept into the bosom of the sea, 

And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades 

That drag the tragic melancholy night. 

When in the ' Third Part ' the Duke of York's son Richard persuaded 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 123 

Shakespeare's pen. Marlowe's assistance at the final 
stage was fragmentary. It is probable that he began 
with Shakespeare the last revision, but that his task was 
interrupted by his premature death. The lion's share of 
the closing phase of the work fell to his younger coadjutor. 

Marlowe, who alone of Shakespeare's contemporaries 
can be credited with exerting on his efforts in tragedy a 
really substantial influence, met his death on Marlowe's 
June I, 1593, in a drunken brawl at Deptford. influence. 
He died at the zenith of his fame, and the esteem 
which his lurid tragedies enjoyed in his lifetime at 
the playhouse survived his violent end. 'Tambur- 
laine,' 'The Jew of Malta,' ' Dr. Faustus,' and 'Edward 
II ' were among the best applauded productions through 
the year 1594. Shakespeare's next two tragedies, 
'Richard III' and 'Richard II,' again pursued historical 
themes ; a little later the tragic story of Shylock the 
Jew was enshrined in his comedy of 'The Merchant of 
Venice.' In all three pieces Shakespeare plainly dis- 
closed a conscious and a prudent resolve to follow in the 
dead Marlowe's footsteps. 

In 'Richard III' Shakespeare, working singlehanded, 
takes up the history of England at the precise point 
where Marlowe and he, working in partnership, 'Richard 
left it in the third part of 'Henry VI.' The ™' 
murder of King Henry closes the old piece; his 
funeral opens the new; and the historic episodes are 
carried onwards, until the Wars of the Roses are finally 
ended by Richard's death on Bosworth Field. Richard's 
career was already familiar to dramatists, but Shake- 

his father to aim at the throne it is unthinkable that any other pen 
than Marlowe's converted the bare lines of the old piece, 

Then, noble father, resolve yourselfe, 
And once more claime the crowne, 

into the touching but strained eloquence of the new piece (i. ii. 28-31) : 

Father, do but think 
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown : 
Within whose circuit is Elysium, 
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy. 



124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

speare found all his material in the ' Chronicle ' of Holin- 
shed. 'Ricardus Tertius/ a Latin piece of Senecan 
temper by Dr. Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College, 
Cambridge, had been in favour with academic audiences 
since 1579, when it was first acted by students at St. 
John's College, Cambridge.^ About 1591 'The True 
Tragedie of Richard III,' a crude piece in EngHsh of the 
chronicle type by some unknown pen, was produced at a 
London theatre, and it issued from the press in 1594. 
Shakespeare's piece bears little resemblance to either 
of its forerunners. The occasional similarities which 
have been detected seem due to all the writers' common 
dependence on the same historic authority .^ Through- 
out Shakespeare's play the effort to emulate Marlowe 
is unmistakable. The tragedy is, says Swinburne, ' as 
fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often, 
though never so inflated in expression, as Marlowe's 
''Tamburlaine" itself.' In thought and melody Mar- 
lowe is for the most part outdistanced, yet the note of 
lyric exaltation is often caught from his lips. As in 
his tragic efforts, the interest centres in a colossal type 
of hero. Richard's boundless egoism and intellectual 
cunning overshadow all else. Shakespeare's characteri- 
sation of the King betrayed a subtlety beyond Mar- 
lowe's reach. But it was the turbulent incident in his 
predecessor's vein which chiefly assured the popularity 
of the piece. Burbage's stirring impersonation of the 
hero was the earliest of his many original interpretations 
of Shakespeare's characters to excite pubHc enthusiasm. 
His vigorous enunciation of Richard Ill's cry 'A horse, 
a horse ! my kingdom for a horse ! ' gave the words 
proverbial . currency.^ 

' See F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, 1914, pp. m seq. 

2 See G. B. Churchill, Richard III up to Shakespeare, Berlin, 1900. 

3 Cf. Richard Corbet's Iter Boreale written about 1618, where it is 
said of an innkeeper at Bosworth who acted as the author's guide to the 
local battlefield : 

For when he would have said King Richard died 
And called 'A horse, a horse !' he Burbage cried. 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 1 25 

It was not until 'Richard III' had exhausted its first 
welcome on the stage that an attempt was made to 
pubHsh the piece. A quarto edition ' as it hath publication 
beene lately acted by the Right honourable of 'Richard 
the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants,' appeared 
in 1597. That year proved of importance in the history 
of Shakespeare's fame and of the publication of his work. 
In 1597 there also came from the press the crude version 
of 'Romeo and Juliet' and the first issue of 'Richard 
11/ the play which Shakespeare wrote immediately after 
'Richard III.' But the text of the early editions of 
' Richard III ' did the drama scant justice. The Quarto 
followed a copy which had been severely abbreviated 
for stage purposes. The First FoHo adopted another 
version which, though more complete, omits some 
necessary passages of the earlier text. A combination 
of the Quarto and the FoHo versions is needful to a full 
comprehension of Shakespeare's effort. None the less 
the original edition of the play was, despite its defects, 
warmly received, and before the First Folio was published 
in 1623 as many as six re-issues of the defective quar- 
ter were in circulation, very slightly varying one from 
another.^ 

The composition of 'Richard II' seems to have fol- 
lowed that of 'Richard III' without delay. The piece 
was probably written very early in 1593. Once again 

^ Andrew Wise, who occupied the shop at the sign of the Angel in 
St. Paul's Churchyard for the ten years that he was in trade (1593- 
1603), was the first publisher of Richard III. He secured licenses for 
the publication of Richard II and Richard III on August 29 and October 
20, 1597, respectively. Both volumes were printed for Wise by Valen- 
tine Simmes (or Sims), whose printing office was at the White Swan, 
at the foot of Adling Hill, near Baynard's Castle. Second editions of 
each were issued by Wise in 1598; Richard II was again printed by 
Simmes, but the second quarto of Richard III was printed by Thomas 
Creede at the Katharine Wheel in Thames Street. In 1602 Creede 
printed for Wise a third edition of Richard III which was described 
without due warrant as 'newly augmented.' On June 25, 1603, Wise 
made over his interest in both Richard II and Richard III to Matthew 
Lawe of St. Paul's Churchyard, who reissued Richard III in 1605, 
1612, 1622, and 1629, and Richard II in 1608 and 1615. 



126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare presents an historic figure who had already 
received dramatic attention. Richard II was a chief 
'Richard character in a brief dramatic sketch of Wat 
^^•' Tyler's rebellion (in 1381), which was com- 

posed in 1587 and was published anonymously in 
1593 as 'The Life and Death of Jack Straw.' The 
King's troubled career up to his delusive triumph over 
his enemies in 1397, was also the theme of a longer 
piece by another anonymous hand.^ But Shakespeare 
owed little to his predecessors' labours. He confined his 
attention to the two latest years and the death of the 
King and ignored the earlier crises of his reign which 
had alone been dramatised previously. 'Richard II' 
is a more penetrating study of historic character and 
a more concentrated portrayal of historic action than 
Shakespeare had yet essayed. There is a greater re- 
straint, a freer flow of dramatic poetry. But again 
there is a clear echo of Marlowe's 'mighty line,' albeit 
in the subdued tone of its latest phase. Shakespeare 
in ' Richard II ' pursued the chastened path of placidity 
on which Marlowe entered in 'Edward II,' the last piece 
to engage his pen. Both Shakespeare's and Marlowe's 
heroes were cast by history in the same degenerate 
mould, and Shakespeare's piece stands to that of Mar- 
lowe in much the relation of son to father. Shake- 
speare traces the development of a self-indulgent tem- 
perament under stress of misfortune far more subtly 
than his predecessor. He endows his King Richard in 
his fall with an imaginative charm, of which Marlowe's 

^ The old play of Richard II, which closes with the murder of the 
King's uncle Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, in 1397, 
survives in MS. in the British Museum (MS. Egerton 1994). It was 
first printed in an edition of eleven copies by Halliwell in 1870, and 
for a second time in the Shakespeare Jahrbiich for 1900, edited by Dr. 
Wolfgang Keller. The piece is a good specimen of the commonplace 
dramatic work of the day. Its composition may be referred to the 
year 1591. A second (lost) piece of somewhat later date, again dealing 
exclusively with the early part of Richard II's reign, which Shake- 
speare's play ignores, was witnessed at the Globe Theatre on April 30, 
161 1, by Simon Forman, who has left a description of the chief incidents 
{New Shakspere Soc. Trans. 1875-6, pp. 41S-6). 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 127 

King Edward shows only incipient traces. Yet Mar- 
lowe's inspiration nowhere fails his great disciple al- 
together. Shakespeare again drew the facts from Holin- 
shed, but his embellishments are more numerous than 
in ' Richard III ' ; they include the magnificent eulogy 
of England which is set in the mouth of John of Gaunt. 
The speech indicates for the time the high-water mark 
of dramatic eloquence on the Elizabethan stage, and 
illustrates the spirited patriotism which animated 
Shakespeare's interpretation of English history. As in 
the first and third parts of 'Henry VI/ prose is avoided 
throughout ; gardeners and attendants speak in verse like 
their betters, a sure sign of Shakespeare's youthful hand. 

The printers of the quarto edition of -'Richard II,' 
which first appeared in 1597, had access to what was 
in the main a satisfactory manuscript. Two re- pubUcation 
prints followed in Shakespeare's lifetime, and of 'Richard 
the editors of the First FoHo were content to 
adopt as their own the text of the third quarto. The 
choice was prudent. From the first two quartos, in 
spite of their genera,l merits, an important passage was 
omitted, and the omission was not repaired till the issue 
of the third in 1608 when the title-page announced that 
the piece was reprinted ' with new additions of the Parlia- 
ment sceane and the deposing of King Richard, as it 
hath been lately acted by the Kinge's Maiesties seruantes 
at the Globe.' The cause of this temporary mutilation 
of the text demands some inquiry, for it illustrates a 
common peril of literature of the time, which Shake- 
speare here encountered for the first, but, as it proved, 
the only time. 

Since the infancy of the drama a royal proclamation 
had prohibited playwrights from touching 'matters of 
religion or governance of the estate of the g^ake- 
common weal,' ^ and on November 12, 1589, speareand 
when Shakespeare was embarking on his career, ^^^ censor. 

^ The proclamation was originally promulgated on May 16, 1559, 
long before the drama had any settled habitation or literary coherence. 



128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the Privy Council reiterated the prohibition, and 
created precise machinery for its enforcement. All 
plays were to be Hcensed by three persons, one to be 
nominated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the second 
by the Lord Mayor, and the third by the Master of the 
Revels. Again there was a warning against unseemly 
reference to matters of divinity and state.' This regula- 
tion of 1589 -remained in force through Shakespeare's 
working days with two shght qualifications. In the 
first place the Master of the Revels — an officer of the 
Royal household — came to perform the licensing duties 
singlehanded, and in the second place Parliament 
strengthened the hcenser's hand by constituting impiety 
on the stage a penal offence.^ 

In the course of Shakespeare's lifetime fellow drama- 
tists not infrequently fell under the licenser's lash on 
charges of theological or pohtical comment and their 
offence was purged by imprisonment or fine. Ben 
Jonson, Chapman, and Thomas Nashe were among the 
playwrights who were at one time or another suspected 
of covert censure of Government or Church and suffered 
in consequence more or less condign punishment. There 
was a nervous tendency on the part of the authorities 
to scent mischief where none was intended. Yet, in 
spite of official sensitiveness and some vexatious molesta- 
tion of authors, literature on and off the stage enjoyed 
in practice a large measure of liberty. The allegation in 
Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' (Ixvi. 9) that 'art' was 'tongue- 
tied by authority ' is the casual expression of a pessimistic 
mood, and has no precise bearing on Shakespeare's 
personal experience. Amid the whole range of Shake- 
speare's work there is only a single passage which, as 
far as is known, evoked official censure. The licenser's 
veto only fell upon 165 lines in Shakespeare's play of 

Mayors of cities, lords lieutenants of counties, and Justices of the peace 
were directed to inhibit within their jurisdictions the performance of 
stage plays tending to heresy or sedition (Collier's History, i. 168-9). 

^ A statute of 1605 (3 Jac. I. cap. 21) rendered players liable to a fine 
of ten pounds for 'profanely abusing the name of God' on the stage. 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, iS9i-iS94 129 

'Richard II.' When that drama was produced, the 
scene of the King's deposition in Westminster Hall 
was robbed of the fine episode where the conquered hero, 
summoned to hear his doom, makes his great speeches 
of submission (iv. i. 154-318). It is curious to note that 
a cognate incident in Marlowe's 'Edward II' (act v. sc. 
i.) escaped rebuke and figured without abridgment in 
the printed version of 1594. But Richard II's fate 
always roused in Queen Elizabeth an especially active 
sense of dread. Her fears were not wholly caprice, for a 
few years later — -early in 1601 — ^ disaffected subjects 
cited Richard II's fortunes as an argument for rebel- 
lion, and the rebel leaders caused Shakespeare's piece 
to be revived at the Globe theatre with the avowed 
object of fanning a revolutionary flame.^ The licenser 
of 'Richard II' had some just ground for his endeavour 
to conciHate royal anxieties. Even so, he did his spiriting 
gently ; he sanctioned the scenes portraying the monarch's 
arrest and his murder in Pomfret Castle, and his knife 
only fell on the King's voluntary surrender of his crown. 
The prohibition, moreover, was not lasting. The 
censored lines were restored to the issue of 1608 when 
James I was King. Shakespeare's interpretation of 
historic incident was invariably independent and sought 
the truth. It does honour to himself and to the govern- 
ment of the country that at no other point in his work 
did he encounter official reprimand. 

Through the last nine months of 1593, from April to 
December, the London theatres were closed, owing to the 
virulence of* the plague. The outbreak excelled The plague 
in severity any of London's recent experiences, ^^ ^S93- 
and although there were many recurrences of the 
pestilence before Shakespeare's career ended, it was 
only once — in 1603 — ^ that the terrors of 1593 were 
surpassed. In 1593 the deaths from the plague reached 
a total of 15,000 for the city and suburbs, one in 15 of 
the population; the victims included the Lord Mayor 
^ See p. 254 infra. 



130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of London and four aldermen. Not merely was public 
recreation forbidden until the peril passed, but contrary 
to precedent, no Bartholomew fair was held in Smithfield.^ 
Deprived of the opportunity of exercising their craft 
in the capital, the players travelled in the country, 
visiting among other places Bristol, Chester, Shrews- 
bury, Chelmsford, and York. There is small reason to 
question that Shakespeare accompanied his colleagues 
on their long tour. 

But, wherever he sojourned while the plague held 
London in its grip, his pen was busily employed, and 
before the close of the next year — 1594 — he had given 
marvellous proof of his rapid and versatile industry. 

It was early in that year (1594) that there was both 
acted and published 'Titus Andronicus,' a bloodstained 
'Titus An- tragedy which plainly savoured of an earlier 
dromcus.' epoch although it was described as 'new.' 
The piece was in his own Hfetime claimed for Shake- 
speare without qualification. Francis Meres, Shake- 
speare's admiring critic of 1598, numbered it among his 
fully accredited works, and it was admitted to the First 
Folio. But Edward Ravenscroft, a minor dramatist of 
Charles II 's time, who prepared a new version of the 
piece in 1678, wrote of it : 'I have been told by some 
anciently conversant with the stage that it was not 
originally his [i.e. Shakespeare's] but brought by a private 
author to be acted, and he only gave some master touches 
to one or two of the principal parts or characters.' 
Ravenscroft's assertion deserves acceptance. The san- 
guinary tragedy presents a fictitious episode illustrative 
of the degeneracy of Imperial Rome. The hero is a 
mythical Roman general, who gives and receives blows of 
nauseating ferocity. The victims of the tragic story are 
not merely killed but savagely mutilated. Crime suc- 
ceeds crime at an ever-quickening pace. The repulsive 
plot and the recondite classical allusions differentiate if 

^ Stow's Annals, p. 766; Creighton's Epidemics in Britain, i. 253-4; 
Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 74 n. 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 13 1 

from Shakespeare's acknowledged work. Yet the offen- 
sive situations are often powerfully contrived and there 
are lines of artistic force and even of beauty. Shake- 
speare's hand is only visible in detached embellishments. 
The play was in all probability written orginally in 1591 
by Thomas Kyd, with some aid, it may be, from Greene 
or Peele, and it was on its revival in 1594 that Shake- 
speare improved it here and there.^ A lost piece of like 
character called 'Titus and Vespasian' was played by 
Lord Strange's men on April 11, 1591.^ 'Titus Androni- 
cus' may well have been a drastic adaptation of this 
piece which was designed, with some help from Shake- 
speare, to prolong public interest in a profitably sensational 
theme. Ben Jonson credits 'Titus Andronicus' with a 
popularity equalling Kyd's lurid 'Spanish Tragedy,' It 
was favorably known abroad as well as at home. 

The Shakespearean 'Titus Andronicus' was acted at 
the Rose theatre by the Earl of Sussex's men on January 
23, 1593-4, when it was described as a 'new' Publication 
piece; yet that company's hold on it was o^ 'Titus.' 
fleeting; it was immediately afterwards acted by 
Shakespeare's company, while the Earl of Pembroke's 
men also claimed a share of the early representations. 
The title-page of the first edition of 1594 describes it as 
having been performed by the Earl of Derby's servants 
(one of the successive titles of Shakespeare's company), 
as well as by those of the Earls of Pembroke and Sussex. 

^ Mr. J. M. Robertson, in his Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus ? 
(1905) ably questions Shakespeare's responsibihty at any point. 

- Cf. Henslowe, ed. Greg, i. 14 seq. ; ii. 155 and 159-162. A German 
play called Tito Andronico, which presents with broad divergences the 
same theme as the Shakespearean piece, was acted by English players 
in Germany and was published in 1620. There Vespasianus, who is 
absent from the Shakespearean Titus, figures among the dramatis per- 
sonce. The German piece is doubtless a rendering of the old English 
play Titus and Vespasian, no text of which survives in the original lan- 
guage. (See Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, pp. 155 seq.) Two Dutch 
versions of Titus and Vespasian were made early in the seventeenth 
century. Of these the later, which alone survives, was first printed 
in 1642 (see a paper by H. de W. Fuller in Modern Language Association 
of America Publications, 1901, ix. p. i). 



132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In the title-page of the second edition of 1600, to 
these three noblemen's names was added that of the 
Lord Chamberlain, who was the Earl of Derby's suc- 
cessor in the patronage of Shakespeare's company. 
Whatever the circumstances in which other companies 
presented the piece, it was more closely identified with 
Shakespeare's colleagues than with any other band of 
players. John Danter, the printer, of Hosier Lane, who 
produced the first (imperfect) quarto of 'Romeo and 
Juliet ' received a license to publish the piece on February 
6, 1593-4. tlis edition soon appeared, being published 
jointly by Edward White, whose shop ' at the little North 
doore of Paules' bore, as the title-page stated, 'the sign 
of the Gun,' and by Thomas Millington, the publisher of 
'The First Contention' and the 'True Tragedie' (early 
drafts of the Second and Third Parts of 'Henry VI'), 
whose shop, unmentioned in the 'Titus' title-page, was 
in Cornhill.^ A second edition of 'Titus' was published 
solely by Edward White in 1600.^ This edition was 
printed by James Roberts, of the Barbican, who was 
printer and publisher of 'the players' bills' or placards 
of the theatrical performances which were displayed on 
posts in the street.^ Roberts was in a favourable posi- 
tion to realise how strongly 'Titus Andronicus' gripped 
average theatrical taste. 

On any showing the distasteful fable of 'Titus An- 
dronicus' engaged little of Shakespeare's attention. All 
his strength was soon absorbed by the composition of 

^ Only one copy of this quarto is known. Its existence was noticed 
by Langbaiije in 1691, but no copy was found to confirm Langbaine's 
statement until January 1905, when an exemplar was discovered among 
the books of a Swedish gentleman of Scottish descent, named Robson, 
who resided at Lund (cf. Athenaiim, Jan. 21, 1905). The quarto was 
promptly purchased by an American collector, Mr. H. C. Folger, of 
New York, for 2000/. 

2 Some years later — in 161 1 — Edward White published a reprint 
of his second edition, which was reproduced in the First Folio. The 
First Folio version adds a short scene (act iii. sc. ii.), which had not 
been in print before. 

3 This office Roberts purchased in 1594 of John Charlewood, and 
held it till 1615, when he sold it to William Jaggard. See p. 553 infra. 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 133 

'The Merchant of Venice/ a comedy, in which two ro- 
mantic love stories are magically blended with a theme 
of tragic import. The plot is a child of mingled .^j^^ 
parentage. For the main thread Shakespeare Merchant^ 
had direct recourse to a book in a foreign tongue ^ ^°'^^' 
— to 'II Pecorone/ a fourteenth-century collection of 
Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, of which there 
was no English translation.^ There a Jewish creditor 
demands a pound of flesh of a defaulting Christian debtor, 
and the latter is rescued through the advocacy of 'the 
lady of Belmont,' who is wife of the debtor's friend. 
The management of the plot in the Italian novel is closely 
followed by Shakespeare. A similar story of a Jew and 
his debtor's friend is very barely outlined in a popular 
mediaeval collection of anecdotes called 'Gesta Roma- 
norum,' while a tale of the testing of a lover's character 
by offer of a choice of three caskets of gold, silver, and 
lead, which Shakespeare combined in 'The Merchant' 
with the legend of the Jew's loan, is told independently 
(and with variations from the Shakespearean form) 
in another portion of the 'Gesta.' But Shakespeare's 
'Merchant' owes important debts to other than Italian 
or Latin sources. He caught hints after his wont from 
one or more than one old English play. Stephen Gosson, 
the sour censor of the infant drama in England, described 
in his 'Schoole of Abuse' (1579) a lost play called 'the 
Jew . . . showne at the Bull [inn] . . . representing 
the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes 
of usurers.' The writer excepts this piece from the cen- 
sure which he flings on well-nigh all other English plays. 
Gosson's description suggests that the two stories of the 
pound of flesh and the caskets had been combined in 
drama before Shakespeare's epoch. The scenes in 
Shakespeare's play in which Antonio negotiates with 

^ Cf. W. G. Waters's translation of II Pecorone, pp. 44-60 (fourth 
day, novel i). The Italian collection was not published till 1558, and 
the story followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any 
language but the original. 



134 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shylock are roughly anticipated, too, by dialogues be- 
tween a Jewish creditor Gerontus and a Christian debtor 
in the extant play of 'The Three Ladies of London' by 
R[obert] W[ilson], which was printed in 1584.^ There 
the Jew opens the attack on his Christian debtor with the 
lines : 

Signer Mercatore, why do you not pay me? Think you I wiU be 
mocked in this sort? 

This three times you have flouted me — it seems you make thereat a 
sport. 

Truly pay me my money, and that even now presently, 

Or by mighty Mahomet, I swear I will forthwith arrest thee. 

Subsequently, when the judge is passing judgment in 
favour of the debtor, the Jew interrupts : 

Stay there, most puissant judge. Signor Mercatore, consider what 
you do. 

Pay me the principal, as for the interest I forgive it you. 

Such phrases are plainly echoed by Shakespeare.^ 

Above all is it of interest to note that Shakespeare 
in 'The Merchant of Venice' shows the last indisputable 
Shviock ^^*^ material trace of his discipleship to Mar- 
andRode- lowc. Although the delicate comedy which 
rigo opez. |jg]^|-gj^g ^j^g serious interest of Shakespeare's 
play sets it in a wholly different category from that of 
Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta,' the humanized portrait of 
the Jew Shylock embodies reminiscences of Marlowe's 

^ The author Robert Wilson was, like Shakespeare himself, well 
known both as player and playwright. The London historian Stow 
credited him with 'a quick delicate refined extemporal wit.' He made 
a reputation by his improvisations. In his Three Ladies of London, as 
in the other plays assigned to him, allegorical characters (in the vein of 
the morality) join concrete men and women in the dramatis persona. 

2 In The Orator (a series of imaginary declamations, which Anthony 
Munday translated from the French and pubhshed in 1596) the speech 
of a Jew who claims a pound of flesh of a Christian debtor and the reply 
of the debtor bear a further resemblance to Shylock's and Antonio's 
passages at arms. The first part of the Orator appeared in French in 
1571, and the whole in 1581. It is unsafe to infer that the Merchant 
of Venice must have been written after 1596, the date of the issue of the 
first English version of the Orator. Shakespeare was quite capable of 
consulting the book in the original language. 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 135 

caricature presentment of the Jew Barabas, while Mar- 
lowe's Jewess Abigail is step-sister to Shakespeare's 
Jewess Jessica. But everywhere Shakespeare outpaced 
his master, and the inspiration that he drew from Marlowe 
in the ' Merchant ' goes little beyond the general concep- 
tion of the Jewish figures. Marlowe's Jewish hero, al- 
though he is described as a victim of persecution, typifies 
a savage greed of gold, which draws him into every man- 
ner of criminal extravagance. Shakespeare's Jew, de- 
spite his mercenary instinct, is a penetrating and tolerant 
interpretation of racial characteristics which are de- 
graded by an antipathetic environment. Doubtless the 
popular interest aroused by the trial in February 
1594 and the execution in June of the Queen's Jewish 
physician, Roderigo Lopez, incited Shakespeare to a subt- 
ler study of Jewish character than had been essayed be- 
fore.^ It is Shylock (not the merchant Antonio) who is 
the hero of the play, and the main interest culminates 
in the Jew's trial and discomfiture. That solemn scene 
trembles on the brink of tragedy. Very bold is the transi- 

1 Lopez was the Earl of Leicester's physician before 1586, and the 
Queen's chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with 
friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the Earl 
of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II's perse- 
cution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to 
stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as 
the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A 
quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London 
offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence 
that he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was 
convicted of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his 
death-warrant, he was hanged at Tyburn on June 7, 1594. His trial 
and execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part 
of the London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England 
at the time. That a Christian named Antonio should be the cause of 
the ruin alike of the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the 
greatest Jew of the Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the 
theory that Lopez was the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the article on 
Roderigo Lopez in the Dictionary of National Biography ; 'The Original 
of Shylock,' by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. February 1880; Dr. 
H. Graetz, Shylock in den Sagen in den Dramen iind in der Geschichte, 
Krotoschin, 1880; New Shakespere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 158- 
92; 'The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,' by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, in 
English Historical Review (1894), iv. 440 seq. 



136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

tion to the gently poetic and humorous incidents of the 
concluding act, where Portia and her waiting maid in 
mascuHne disguise lightly banter their husbands Bassanio 
and Gratiano on their apparent fickleness. The change 
of tone attests a mastery of stage craft ; yet the interest 
of the play, while it is sustained to the end, is, after 
Shylock's final exit, pitched in a lower key. 

A piece called 'The Venesyon Comedy' which the 
Lord Admiral's men produced at the Rose theatre on 

August 25, 1594, and performed twelve times 
knowiedg- withiu the following nine months,^ was pre- 
mentsto sumcd by Malone to be an early version of 

'The Merchant of Venice.' The identifica- 
tion is very doubtful, but the 'Merchant's' affinity with 
Marlowe's work, and the metrical features which resemble 
those of the 'Two Gentlemen,' suggest that the date of 
first composition was scarcely later than 1 594. ' The Mer- 
chant' is the latest play in which Marlowe's sponsorship 
is a living inspiration. Shakespeare's subsequent allu- 
sions to his association with Marlowe sound like fading 
reminiscences of the past. In 'As You Like It' (iii. v. 
80) he parenthetically and vaguely commemorated his 
acquaintance with the elder dramatist by apostrophising 
him in the lines : 

Dead Shepherd ! now I find thy saw of might : 
'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' 

The 'saw' is a quotation from Marlowe's poem 'Hero and 
Leander' (line 76). In the 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 
(ill. i. 17-21) Shakespeare places on the lips of Sir Hugh 
Evans, the Welsh parson, confused snatches of verse from 
Marlowe's charming lyric, ' Come live with me and be my 
love.' The echoes of his master's voice have lost their 
distinctness. 

On July 17, 1598, several years after its production 
on the stage, the well-estabHshed 'stationer' James 
Roberts, who printed the second edition of 'Titus 

^ Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 19, ii. 167 and 170. 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 137 

Andronicus ' and other of Shakespeare's plays, secured a 
license from the Stationers' Company for the publica- 
tion of ' The Merchaunt of Venyce, or otherwise publication 
called the Jewe of Venyce.' But to the license of 'The 
there was attached the unusual condition that ^^'^ ^^^' 
neither Roberts nor 'any other whatsoever' should print 
the piece before the Lord Chamberlain gave his assent to 
the publication.^ More than two years elapsed after the 
grant of the original license before 'The Merchant' 
actually issued from the press. 'By consent of Master 
Roberts' a second license was granted on October 28, 
1600, to another stationer Thomas Heyes (or Haies), and 
when the year 1600 was closing Heyes published the first 
edition which Roberts printed for him. Heyes's text, 
which was more satisfactory than was customary, was in 
due time transferred to the First Folio. ^ 

To 1594 must be assigned one more historical piece, 
'King John.' Like the First and Third Parts of 'Henry 
VI' and 'Richard II' the play altogether 'King 
eschews prose. Strained conceits and rhe- J°^°-' 

^ Arber, Stationers' Registers, iii. 122. Apparently the players were 
endeavouring to persuade their patron the Lord Chamberlain to exert 
his influence against the unauthorised publication of plays. On June i, 
1599, the wardens of the Stationers' Company, by order of the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, gave the drastic direc- 
tion 'That noe playes be printed excepte they bee allowed by suche as 
haue aucthorytie.' The prohibition would seem to have resulted in a 
temporary suspension of the issue of plays which were in the repertory 
of Shakespeare's company; but the old irregular conditions were re- 
sumed in the autumn of 1600, and they experienced no further check in 
Shakespeare's era. 

2 The imprint of the first quarto of The Merchant runs : 'At London, 
Printed by I[ames] R[oberts] for Thomas Heyes and are to be sold in 
Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Greene Dragon. 1600.' Cf. 
Arber, Transcript, iii. 175. Heyes attached pecuniary value to his 
publishing rights in The Merchant of Venice. On July 8, 1619, his son, 
Laurence, as heir to his father, paid a fee to the Stationers' Company on 
their granting him a formal recognition of his exclusive interest in the 
publication (Arber, iii. 651). There is ground for treating another early 
quarto of The Merchant which bears the imprint ' Printed by J. Roberts 
1600' as a revised but unauthorised and misdated reprint of Heyes's 
quarto which William Jaggard, the successor to Roberts's press, printed 
for Thomas Pavier, an unprincipled stationer, in 16 19 (see Pollard, 
Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq., and p. 559 infra). 



138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

torical extravagances which tend to rant and bom- 
bast are clear proofs of early composition. Again the 
theme had already attracted dramatic effort. Very 
early in Queen Elizabeth's reign, Bishop Bale, a fanati- 
cal protestant controversialist, had produced a crude piece 
called 'King Johan,' which presented from an ultra- 
protestant point of view the story of that King's struggle 
with Rome for the most part allegorically, after the 
manner of the morality. There is no evidence that 
Shakespeare knew anything of Bale's work, which re- 
mained- in manuscript until 1838. More pertinent is the 
circumstance that in 1591 there was published anony- 
mously a rough piece in two parts entitled ' The Trouble- 
some Raigne of King John.' A prehminary 'Address to 
the Gentlemen Readers' reminds them of the good re- 
ception which they lately gave to the Scythian Tambur- 
laine. This reference to Marlowe's tragedy points to 
the model which the unknown author set before himself. 
There is no other ground for associating Marlowe's name 
with the old play, which lacks any sign of genuine power. 
Yet the old piece deserves grateful mention, for it sup- 
plied Shakespeare with all his material for his new 'his- 
tory.' In 'King John' he worked without disguise over 
a predecessor's play, and sought no other authority. 
Every episode and every character are anticipated in 
the previous piece. Like his guide, Shakespeare em- 
braces the whole sixteen years of King John's reign, yet 
spends no word on the chief pohtical event — the signing 
of Magna Carta. But into the adaptation Shakespeare 
flung all his energy, and the theme grew under his hand 
into great tragedy. It is not only that the chief charac- 
ters are endowed with new life and glow with dramatic 
fire, but the narrow polemical and malignant censure of 
Rome and Spain which disfigures the earlier play is for 
the most part eliminated. The old ribald scene de- 
signed to expose the debaucheries of the monks of 
Swinstead Abbey is expunged by Shakespea^re, and he 
pays little heed to the legend of the monk's poisoning 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 1 39 

of King John, which fills a large place on the old canvas. 
The three chief characters — the mean and cruel king, the 
noble-hearted and desperately wronged Constance, and 
the soldierly humorist, Faulconbridge — are recreated 
by Shakespeare's pen, and are portrayed with the same 
sureness of touch that marks in Shy lock his rapidly 
maturing strength. The scene in which the gentle boy 
Arthur learns from Hubert that the king has ordered 
his eyes to be put out is as affecting as any passage in 
tragic literature. The older playwright's lifeless presen- 
tation of the incident gives a fair measure of his inepti- 
tude. Shakespeare's 'King John' was not printed till 
1623, but an unprincipled and ill-advised endeavour was 
made meanwhile to steal a march on the reading public. 
In 161 1 the old piece was reissued as 'written by W. Sh.' 
in 1622 the pubhsher went a step further in his career of 
fraud and on the title-page of a new edition declared its 
author to be 'W. Shakespeare.' 

At the close of 1594 a performance of Shakespeare's 
early farce, 'The Comedy of Errors,' gave him a passing 
notoriety that he could well have spared. The 
piece was played (apparently by professional of Errors' 
actors) on the evening of Innocents' Day j^^g^y 
(December 28), 1594, in the hall of Gray's Inn, 
before a crowded audience of benchers, students, and 
their friends. There was some disturbance during the 
evening on the part of guests from the Inner Temple, 
who, dissatisfied with the accommodation afforded them, 
retired in dudgeon. 'So that night,' a contemporary 
chronicler states, 'was begun and continued to the end 
in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was 
ever afterwards called the "Night of Errors.'" ^ Shake- 
speare was acting on the same day before the Queen at 
Greenwich, and it is doubtful if he were present. On the 
morrow a commission of oyer and terminer inquired into 

^ Gesta Grayorum, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manuscript. 
A second performance of the Comedy of Errors was given at Gray's Inn 
Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, 1895. 



I40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the causes of the tumult, which was mysteriously attri- 
buted to a sorcerer having ' foisted a company of base and 
common fellows to make up our disorders with a play of 
errors and confusions.' 

Fruitful as were these early years, there are critics who 
would enlarge by conjecture the range of Shakespeare's 
Early plays accredited activities. Two plays of uncertain 
doubtfully authorship attracted public attention during 
Shake- ^ the period under review (i 591-4) — 'Arden of 
speare. Fcversham' 1 and 'Edward III.' ^ Shake- 
speare's hand has been traced in both, mainly on the 
ground that their dramatic energy is of a quality 
not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary 
whose writings are extant. There is no external evi- 
dence in favour of Shakespeare's authorship in either 
case. 'Arden of Feversham' dramatises with intensity 
and insight a sordid murder of a husband by a wife which 
was perpetrated at Faversham on February 15, j 5 50-1, 
'Arden of ^^^ ^^^ fully reported by Holinshed and more 
Fever- briefly by Stow. The subject in its realistic 
sham. veracity is of a different type from any which 
Shakespeare is known to have treated, and although 
the play may be, as Swinburne insists, 'a young man's 
work,' it bears no relation either in topic or style to the 
work on which young Shakespeare was engaged at a 
date so early as 1591 or 1592. The character of the 
murderess (Arden's wife Alice) is finely touched, but her 
brutal instincts strike a jarring note which conflicts with 
the Shakespearean spirit of tragic art.^ 

'Edward III' is a play in Marlowe's vein, and has 
been assigned to Shakespeare with greater confidence on 
even more shadowy grounds. The competent Shake- 

^ Licensed for publication April 3, 1592, and published in 1592. 

2 Licensed for publication December i, 1595, and published in 1596. 

^ In 1770 the critic Edward Jacob, in his edition of Arden of Fever- 
sham, first assigned Arden to Shakespeare, claiming it to be 'his earliest 
dramatic work.' Swinburne supported the theory, which is generally 
discredited. The piece would seem to be by some unidentified disciple 
of Kyd (cf. Kyd's Works, ed. Boas, p. Ixxxix). 



PROGRESS AS PLAYWRIGHT, 1591-1594 141 

spearean critic Edward Capell reprinted it in his 'Pro- 
lusions' in 1760, and described it as 'thought to be writ 
by Shakespeare.' A century later Tennyson 'Edward 
accepted with some qualification the attri- ^^^•' 
bution, which Swinburne, on the other hand, warmly 
contested. The piece is a curious medley of history and 
romance. Its main theme, confusedly drawn from Holin- 
shed, presents Edward Ill's wars in France, with the 
battles of Crecy and Poitiers and the capture of Calais, but 
the close of act i. and the whole of act 11. dramatise an 
unhistoric tale of dishonourable love which the Italian 
novelist Bandello told of an unnamed King of England 
who sought to defile ' the Countess of Salisbury,' the wife 
of a courtier. Bandello's fiction was rendered into Eng- 
lish in Painter's ' Palace of Pleasure,' and the author of 
'Edward III' unwarrantably put the tale of illicit love 
to the discredit of his hero. Many speeches scattered 
through the drama and the whole scene (act 11. sc. ii.), in 
which the Countess of Salisbury repulses the advances 
of Edward III, show the hand of a master. The Coun- 
tess's language, which breathes a splendid romantic en- 
ergy, has chiefly led critics to credit Shakespeare with 
responsibility for the piece. But there is even in the style 
of these contributions much to dissociate them from 
Shakespeare's acknowledged work, and to justify their 
ascription to some less gifted disciple of Marlowe.^ ~ A 
line in act 11. sc. i. ('Lilies that fester smell far worse than 
weeds') reappears in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' (xciv. 
line 14),^ and there are other expressions in those poems, 
which seem to reflect phrases in the play of 'Edward III.' 
It was contrary to Shakespeare's practice literally to 
plagiarise himself. Whether the dramatist borrowed 
from a manuscript copy of the ' Sonnets ' or the sonnet- 
teer borrowed from the drama are questions which are 
easier to ask than to answer.^ 

^ Cf. Swinburne, Sttidy of Shakespeare, pp. 231-274. 
2 See p. 159 infra. 

^ For other plays of somewhat later date which have been falsely 
assigned to Shakespeare, see pp. 260 seq. infra. 



IX 

THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 

During the busy years (i 591-4) that witnessed his first 
pronounced successes as a dramatist, Shakespeare came 
Publication before the pubHc in yet another Hterary ca- 
°|^|jVenus pacity. On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, 
Adonis,' the printer, who was his fellow-townsman, ob- 
,^^^■3" tained a license for the publication of 'Venus 

and Adonis,' Shakespeare's metrical version of a classi- 
cal tale of love. The manuscript was set up at Field's 
press at Blackfriars, and the book was published in 
accordance with the common contemporary division 
of labour by the stationer John Harrison, whose shop was 
at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul's Church- 
yard. No author's name figured on the title-page, but 
Shakespeare appended his full signature to the dedica- 
tion, which he addressed in conventional terms to Henry 
Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. The Earl, who 
was in his twentieth year, was reckoned the hand- 
somest man at Court, with a pronounced disposition to 
gallantry. He had vast possessions, was well educated, 
loved literature, and through life extended to men of 
letters a generous patronage.^ 'I know not 
to the Earl how I shall offeud,' Shakespeare now wrote to 
amlon^" him in a style flavoured by euphuism, 'in dedi- 
cating my unpolished lines to your lordship, 
nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong 
a prop to support so weak a burden ; only if your Honour 
seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and 
vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have hon- 

^ See Appendix, sections iii. and iv. 
142 



FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 143 

cured you with some graver labour. But if the first 
heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it 
had so noble a godfather ; and never after ear [i.e. plough] 
so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. 
I leave it to your honourable survey, and your Honour 
to your heart's content ; which I wish may always answer 
your own wish, and the world's hopeful expectation.' 
The subscription ran 'Your Honour's in all duty, William 
Shakespeare.' 

The writer's mention of the work as 'the first heir of 
my invention' implies that the poem was written, or at 
least designed, before Shakespeare undertook .-phe first 
any of his dramatic work. But there is reason heir of my 
to believe that the first draft lay in the author's '°^^°*'°°- 
desk through four or five summers and underwent some 
retouching before it emerged from the press in its final 
shape. Shakespeare, with his gigantic powers of work, 
could apparently count on 'idle hours' even in the 
well-filled days which saw the completion of the four 
original plays — 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'Two Gentle- 
ment of Verona,' 'Comedy of Errors,' and 'Romeo and 
Juliet ' — as well as the revision of the three parts of 
'Henry VI' and 'Titus Andronicus,' while 'Richard III' 
and 'Richard II' were in course of drafting. Marlowe's 
example may here as elsewhere have stimulated Shake- 
speare's energy ; for at that writer's death (June i, 1593) 
he left unfinished a poetic rendering of another amorous 
tale of classic breed — the story of Hero and Leander 
by the Greek poet Musaeus.^ 

Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' is affluent in 
beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness ; but it is 

^ Marlowe's Hero and Leander was posthumously licensed for the 
press on September 28, 1593, some months after Venus and Adonis; 
but it was not published tUl 1598, in a volume to which George Chap- 
man contributed a continuation completing the work. About 1596 
Richard Carew in a letter on the 'Excellencie of the English tongue' 
linked Shakespeare's poem with Marlowe's 'fragment,' and credited 
them jointly with the literary merit of Catullus (Camden's Remaines, 
1614, p. 43). 



144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

imbued with a juvenile tone of license, which harmo- 
nises with its pretension of youthful origin. The irrele- 
vant details, the many figures drawn from the sounds and 
sights of rural or domestic life, confirm the impression of 
adolescence, although the graphic justness of observation 
and the rich harmonies of language anticipate the touch 
of maturity, and traces abound of wide reading in both 
classical and recent domestic Hterature. The topic was 
one which was likely to appeal to a young patron like 
Southampton, whose culture did not discourage lascivious 
tastes. 

The poem offers signal proof of Shakespeare's early 
devotion to Ovid. The title-page bears a beautiful Latin 
motto : 

Vilia' miretur vulgus ; mihi flavus Apollo 
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. 

The lines come from the Roman poet's 'Amores,' and, 
in his choice of the couplet, Shakespeare again showed 
loyalty to Marlowe's example.^ 

The legend of Venus and Adonis was sung by Theoc- 
ritus and Bion, the pastoral poets of Sicily ; but 
The debt Shakcspcarc made its acquaintance in the brief 
to Ovid. version which figures in a work by Ovid which 
is of greater note than his ' Amores ' — in his ' Meta- 
morphoses' (Book X. 520-560; 707-738). Not that 

1 The motto is taken from Ovid's Amores, liber i. elegy xv. 11. 35-6. 
Portions of the Amores or Elegies of Love were translated by Mar- 
lowe about 1589, and were first printed without a date, probably 
about 1597, in Epigrammes and Elegies by I[ohn] D[avies] and C[hris- 
topher] M[arlowe]. Marlowe, whose version circulated in manuscript 
in the eight years' interval, rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare 
thus : 

Let base conceited wits admire vile things, 

Fair Phcebus lead me to the Muses' springs ! 

This poem of Ovid's Amores was popular with other Elizabethans. 
Ben Jonson placed another version of it on the lips of a character called 
Ovid in his play of the Poetaster (1602). Jonson presents Shakespeare's 
motto in the awkward garb : 

Kneele hindes to trash : me let bright Phcebus swell, 
With cups full flowing from the Muses' well. 



FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 145 

Shakespeare was a slavish borrower. On Ovid's nar- 
rative of the Adonic fable he embroidered reminis- 
cences of two independent episodes in the same treasury 
of mythology, viz. : the wooing of the reluctant Herma- 
phroditus by the maiden Salmacis (Book IV.) and the 
hunting of the Calydonian boar (Book VIII.). Again, 
however helpful Ovid's work proved to Shakespeare, 
'the first heir' of his invention found supplementary 
inspiration elsewhere. The Roman poet had given the 
myth a European vogue. Echoes of it are heard in the 
pages of Dante and Chaucer, and it was developed before 
Shakespeare wrote by poets of the Renaissance in six- 
teenth-century Italy and France. In the year of 
Shakespeare's birth Ronsard, the chieftain of contempo- 
rary French poetry, versified the tale of Venus and Adonis 
with pathetic charm, ^ and during Shakespeare's boyhood 
many fellow-countrymen emulated the Continental 
example. Spenser, Robert Greene, and Marlowe bore 
occasional witness in verse to the myth's influence 
fascination, while Thomas Lodge described in °^ Lodge. 
detail Adonis's death and Venus's grief in prefatory 
stanzas before his ' Scillaes Metamorphosis : Enterlaced 
with the unfortunate love of Glaucus ' (published in 
1589). Lodge's main theme was a different fable, 
drawn from the same rich mine of Ovid. His effort is 
the most notable pre-Shakespearean experiment in the 
acclimatisation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' in English 
verse. 

Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' is in the direct 
succession of both Continental and Elizabethan culture, 
which was always loyal to classical tradition. His metre 
is the best proof of his susceptibility to current vogue. 
He employed the sixain or six-line stanza rhyming ababcc, 
which is the commonest of all forms of narrative verse 
in both English and French poetry of the sixteenth 
century. Spenser had proved the stanza's capacity in his 
' Astrophel,' his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, while Thomas 
^ See French Renaissance in England, 220. 



146 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Lodge had shown its adaptability to epic purpose in that 
Ovidian poem of 'Scillaes Metamorphosis' which treats 
in part of Shakespeare's theme. On metrical as well as 
on critical grounds Lodge should be credited with helping 
efficiently to mould Shakespeare's first narrative poem.^ 
A year after the issue of 'Venus and Adonis,' in 1594, 
Shakespeare published another poem in like vein, which 
, told the tragic tale of Lucrece, the accepted 
pattern of conjugal fidelity alike through 
classical times and the Middle Ages. The tone is graver 
than that of its predecessor, and the poet's reading 
had clearly taken a wider range. Moral reflections 
abound, and there is some advance in metrical dex- 
terity and verbal harmony. But there is less fresh- 
ness in the imagery and at times the language tends to 
bombast. Long digressions interrupt the flow of the 
narrative. The heroine's allegorical addresses to ' Op- 
portunity Time's servant' and to 'Time the lackey of 
Eternity' occupy 133 lines (869-1001), while the spirited 
description of a picture of the siege of Troy is prolonged 
through 202 lines (1368-1569), nearly a ninth part of the 
whole poem. The metre is changed. The six-line stanza 
of 'Venus' is replaced by a seven-line stanza which 
Chaucer often used in the identical form ababbcc. The 

^ Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Lodge's Scillaes Metamor- 
phosis, by James P. Reardon, in 'Shakespeare Society's Papers,' iii. 
143-6. Cf. Lodge's description of Venus's discovery of the wounded 
Adonis : 

Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere, 
Her roseall Hp alied to his pale cheeke, 
Her sighs and then her lookes and heavie cheere, 
Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke : 

How on his senseless corpse she lay a-crying, 

As if the boy were then but new a-dying. 

In the minute description in Shakespeare's poem of the chase of the 
hare (11. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to the Ode de la Chase 
(on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in his Gluvres 
et Meslanges Poetiques, 1574. For fuller illustration of Shakespeare's 
sources and analogues of the poem, and of its general literary history and 
bibliography, see the present writer's introduction to the facsimile re- 
production of the first quarto edition of Venus and Adonis (1593), Claren- 
don Press, 1905. ^ 



FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 147 

stanza was again common among Elizabethan poets. 
Prosodists christened it 'rhyme royal' and regarded it 
as peculiarly well adapted to any 'historical or grave' 
theme. 

The second poem was entered in the 'Stationers' 
Registers' on May 9, 1594, under the title of 'A Booke 
intitled the Ravyshement of Lucrece,' and ^^^^^^ 
was published in the same year under the title edition, 
of 'Lucrece.' As in the case of 'Venus and ^^^'^' 
Adonis,' it was printed by Shakespeare's fellow- towns- 
man Richard Field. But the copyright was vested in 
John Harrison, who published and sold it at the sign of 
the White Greyhound in St. Paul's Churchyard. He was 
a prominent figure in the book-trade of the day, being 
twice master of the Stationers' Company, and shortly 
after publishing Shakespeare's second poem he acquired 
of Field the copyright, in addition, of the dramatists' 
first poem, of which he was already the publisher. 

Lucrece's story, which flourished in classical literature, 
was absorbed by mediaeval poetry, and like the tale of 
Venus and Adonis was subsequently endowed Sources of 
with new life by the literary effort of the Euro- '^^ ^^°^- 
pean Renaissance. There are signs that Shakespeare 
sought hints at many hands. The classical version 
of Ovid's 'Fasti' (ii. 721-852) gave him a primary 
clue. But at the same time he seems to have assimilated 
suggestion from Livy's version of the fable in his 'History 
of Rome' (Bk. I. ch. 57-59), which William Painter para- 
phrased in English in the 'Palace of Pleasure.' Ad- 
mirable help was also available in Chaucer's 'Legend of 
Good Women' (lines 1680-1885), where the fifth section 
deals with Lucretia's pathetic fortunes, and Bandello had 
developed the theme in an Italian novel. Again, as in 
'Venus and Adonis,' there are subsidiary indications in 
phrase, episode, and sentiment of Shakespeare's debt to 
contemporary English poetry. The accents of Shake- 
speare's 'Lucrece' often echo those of Daniel's poetic 
'Complaint of Rosamond' (King Henry II' s mistress), 



148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

which, with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to 'Lu- 
crece' in even closer relation than Lodge's 'Scilla,' with 
its six-line stanza, to ' Venus and Adonis.' The piteous 
accents of Shakespeare's heroine are those of Daniel's 
heroine purified and glorified.^ Lucrece's apostrophe to 
Time (lines 939 seq.) suggests indebtedness to two other 
English poets, Thomas Watson in 'Hecatompathia,' 
1582 (Sonnets xlvii. and Ixxvii.), and Giles Fletcher in 
'Licia,' 1593 (Sonnet xxviii.). Fletcher anticipated at 
many points Shakespeare's catalogue of Time's varied 
activities.^ The curious appeal of Lucrece to personi- 
fied ' Opportunity ' (lines 869 seq.) appears to be his 
unaided invention. 

Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to 
the Earl of Southampton, the patron of his first, but his 
Second language displays a greater warmth of feeling, 
letter to Shakespeare now addressed the young Earl in 
South- terms of devoted friendship, which were not un- 
ampton. common at the time in communications be- 
tween patrons and poets, but they suggest here 
that Shakespeare's relations with the brilliant young 
nobleman had grown closer since he dedicated 'Venus 
and Adonis' to him in more formal style a year before. 
'The love I dedicate to your lordship,' Shakespeare wrote 

^ Rosamond, in Daniel's poem, muses tlius when King Henry chal- 
lenges her honour : 

But what ? he is my King and may constraine me ; 
Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed. 
The World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me, 
I shall be judg'd his Love and so be shamed ; 
We see the faire condemn'd that never gamed. 

And if I yeeld, 'tis honourable shame. 

If not, I live disgrac'd, yet thought the same. 

^ The general conception of Time's action can of course be traced 
very far back in poetry. Watson acknowledged that his lines were 
borrowed from the Italian Serafino, and Fletcher imitated the Neapolitan 
Latinist Angerianus; while both Serafino and Angerianus owed much 
to Ovid's pathetic lament in Tristia (iv. 6, i-io). That Shakespeare 
knew Watson's chain of reflections seems proved by his verbatim quota- 
tion of one link in Much Ado aboiit Nothing (i. i. 271) : 'In time the 
savage bull doth bear the yoke.' There are plain indications in Shake- 
speare's Sonnets that Fletcher's Licia was familiar to him. 



FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 149 

in the opening pages of 'Lucrece,' 'is without end, whereof 
this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous 
moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable dis- 
position, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it 
assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I 
have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours. 
Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater ; 
meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship ; to whom 
I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.' The 
subscription runs ' Your Lordship's in all duty, Wil- 
liam Shakespeare.' ^ 

In these poems Shakespeare made his earliest appeal 
to the world of readers. The London playgoer already 
knew his name as that of a promising actor 
and a successful playwright. But when ' Ve- ti^recep-^' 
nus and Adonis' appeared in i^QS, no word tionofthe 

... 1 ,, ^^ . . . 1 ji ^• ^ J two poems. 

of his dramatic composition had seen the light 
of the printing press. Early in the following year, a 
month or two before the publication of ' Lucrece,' there 
were issued the plays of ' Titus Andronicus ' and the first 
part of the 'Contention' (the early draft of the Second 
Part of 'Henry VI'), to both of which Shakespeare had 
lent a revising hand. But so far, his original dramas had 
escaped the attention of traders in books. His early 
plays brought him at the outset no reputation as a man 
of letters. It was not as the myriad-minded dramatist, 
but in the restricted role of versifier of classical fables 
familiar to all cultured Europe, that he first impressed 
studious contemporaries with the fact of his mighty 
genius. The reading public welcomed his poetic tales 
with unqualified enthusiasm. The sweetness of the verse, 
the poetic flow of the narrative, and the graphic imagery 
discountenanced censure of the licentious treatment of 
the themes even on the part of the seriously minded. 
Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulo- 

■^ For fuller illustration of the poem's literary history and bibliography, 
see the present writer's introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the 
first quarto edition of Lucrece (1594), Clarendon Press, 1905. ■ 



150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

gies in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author 
had gained a place in permanence on the summit of 
Parnassus. 'Lucrece,' wrote Michael Drayton in his 
'Legend of Matilda' (1594), was 'revived to live another 
age.' A year later Wilham Covell, a Cambridge fellow, 
in his 'Polimanteia,' gave 'all praise' to 'sweet Shake- 
speare' for his 'Lucrecia.' ^ 

In 1598 Richard Barnfield, a poet of some lyric power, 
sums up the general estimate of the two works thus : 

Barnfield's ^^^ Shakespeare thou, whose hony-flowing Vaine, 
tribute. (Pleasing the World) thy Praises doth obtaine. 

Whose Venus, and whose Lucrece (sweete and chaste) 
Thy name in fames immortall Booke have plac't, 
Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever : 
Well may the Bodye dye, but Fame dies never.^ 

In the same year the rigorous critic and scholar, Gabriel 
Harvey, distinguished between the respective impres- 
sions which the two poems made on the public. Harvey 
reported that 'the younger sort take much dehght' in 
'Venus and Adonis,' while 'Lucrece' pleased 'the wiser 
sort.' ^ A poetaster John Weever, in a sonnet addressed 
to ' honey- tongued Shakespeare' in his 'Epigramms' 
(1599), eulogised the poems indiscriminately as an un- 
matchable achievement, while making vaguer and less 
articulate mention of the plays 'Romeo' and 'Richard' 
and 'more whose names I know not.' 

Printers and pubHshers of both poems strained their 
resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers. 
No fewer than six editions of ' Venus ' appeared between 
1592 and 1602; a seventh followed in 161 7, and a 

^ In a copy supposed to be unique of this work, formerly the property 
of Prof. Dowden, the author gives his name at the foot of the dedication 
to the Earl of Essex as 'W. Covell.' (See Dowden's Sale Catalogue 
Hodgson and Co., London, Dec. 16, 1913, p. 40.) Covell was a Fellow 
of Queens' College, Cambridge. (See Diet. Nat. Biog.) In all other 
known copies of the Polimanteia the author's signature appears as 
'W. C — initials which have been wrongly identified with those of 
William Clerke, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 

2 Barnfield's Poems in Divers Humours, 1589, 'A Remembrance of 
some English Poets.' 

3 Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, 1913; see p. 358. 



FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 15I 

twelfth in 1636. 'Lucrece ' achieved a fifth edition in the 
year of Shakespeare's death, and an eighth edition in 

There is a Hkehhood, too, that Edmund Spenser, the 
greatest of Shakespeare's poetic contemporaries, was first 
drawn by the poems into the ranks of Shake- Shake- 
speare's admirers. Among the ten contempo- speareand 
rary poets whom Spenser saluted mostly under p^^^^"^- 
fanciful names in his 'Colin Clouts come home againe' 
(completed in 1594),^ it is hardly doubtful that he greeted 
Shakespeare under the name of 'Action' — a familiar 
Greek proper name derived from aero^i, an eagle. Spen- 
ser wrote : 

And there, though last not least is Action ; 

A gentler Shepheard may no where be found, 
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, 

Doth, like himself e, heroically sound. 

The last line alludes to Shakespeare's surname, and ad- 
umbrates the later tribute paid by the dramatist's friend, 
Ben Jonson, to his 'true-filed lines,' which had the power 
of 'a lance as brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.' ^ We 
may assume that the admiration of Spenser for Shake- 
speare was reciprocal. At any rate Shakespeare paid 
Spenser the compliment of making reference to his 
'Teares of the Muses' (1591) in 'Midsummer Night's 
Dream' (v. i. 52-3). 

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death] 
Of learning, late deceased in beggary, 

is there paraded as the theme of one of the dramatic 
entertainments wherewith it is proposed to celebrate 

^ See pp. 542-3 infra. 

2 Cf. Malone's Variorum, ii. 224-279, where an able attempt is made 
to identify all the writers noticed by Spenser, e.g. Thomas Churchyard 
('Harpalus'), Abraham Fraunce ('Corydon'), Arthur Gorges ('Alcyon'),. 
George Peele ('Pahn'), Thomas Lodge ('Alcon'), Arthur Golding 
('Palemon'), and the fifth Earl of Derby ('Amyntas'), the patron of 
Shakespeare's company of actors. Spenser mentions Alabaster and 
Daniel without disguise. 

^ Similarly Fuller, in his Worthies, likens Shakespeare to 'Martial 
in the warlike sound of his surname.' 



152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Theseus's marriage. In Spenser's 'Teares of the Muses' 
each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence 
on the Kterary and dramatic effort of the age. Shake- 
speare's Theseus dismisses the suggestion with the frank 
but not unkindly comment : 

That is some satire keen and critical, 
Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony. 

But it may be safely denied that Spenser in the same 
poem referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made 
Thalia deplore the recent death of 'our pleasant Willy.' ^ 
The name Willy was frequently used in contemporary 
literature as a term of familiarity without relation to the 
baptismal name of the person referred to. Sir Philip 
Sidney was addressed as 'Willy' by some of his elegists. 
A comic actor, ' dead of late' in a literal sense, was clearly 
intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute 
the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator 
that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English 
comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian, 
Richard Tarleton.^ Similarly the 'gentle spirit' who is 
described by Spenser in a still later stanza as sitting 'in 
idle cell ' rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be 
more reasonably identified with Shakespeare.^ 

1 All these and all that els the Comick Stage 
With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced, 
By which mans life in his likest image 
Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced , . . 
And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made 
To mock her selfe and Truth to imitate, 
With kindly counter under mimick shade, 
Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late ; 
With whom all joy and jolly meriment 
Is also deaded and in dolour drent (11. 199-210). 

2 A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand 
was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of 
Spenser's Works (cf. Outlines, ii. 394-5). 

2 But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen 
Large streames of honnie and sweet e nectar flowe. 
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men 
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe, 
-'• ! ■ Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell 

Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (11. 217-22). 



FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC 1 53 

Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem in 
a circle more exclusive than that of actors, men of letters, 
or the general reading public. His genius and patrons 
' civil demeanour ' of which Chettle wrote in ^^ ^°^^^- 
1592 arrested the notice not only of the brilliant 
Earl of Southampton but of other exalted patrons of 
literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court 
with Burbage and Kemp, the two most famous actors of 
the day, during the Christmas season of 1594 was pos- 
sibly due in part to the personal interest which he had 
excited among satellites of royalty. Queen Elizabeth 
quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her 
reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence. 
Every year his company contributed to her Christmas 
festivities. The revised version of 'Love's Labour's 
Lost' was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and 
tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthu- 
siasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. 
Under Queen Elizabeth's successor Shakespeare greatly 
strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson 
claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of 
King James I. When Jonson in his elegy of Shake- 
speare wrote 

Those flights upon the banks of Thames 
That so did take Eliza and our James, 

he was mindful of the many representations of Shake- 
speare's plays which glorified the river palaces of White- 
hall, Windsor, Richmond, and Greenwich during the last 
decade of the great Queen's reign. 



X 

THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY 

It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with 
men and women of the Court that most of his sonnets 
The vogue owed their existence. In Italy and France the 
of the practice of writing and circulating series of 
bethan sonnets inscribed to great personages flour- 
sonnet, ished continuously through the greater part 
of the sixteenth century. In England, until the last 
decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. 
Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the 
English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas 
Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when 
Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, 
when Sir PhiKp Sidney's collection of sonnets en- 
titled 'Astrophel and Stella' was first pubhshed, that 
the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or con- 
tinuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the 
appearance of Sir Phihp Sidney's volume the writing of 
sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged 
more literary activity in this country than it engaged at 
any period here or elsewhere.^ Men and women of the 
cultivated Ehzabethan nobility encouraged poets to 
celebrate in single sonnets or in short series their virtues 
and graces, and under the same patronage there were 
produced multitudes of long sonnet-sequences which 
more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of 
Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of 
love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame 

^ Section ix. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each 
of the numerous collections of sonnets which tore witness to the un- 
exampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597. 

154 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 155 

in the country failed to count a patron's ears by a trial of 
skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, 
who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contempo- 
rary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with 
all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at 
its height. 

The dramatist lightly experimented with the sonnet 
from the outset of his literary career. Ten times he wove 
the quatorzain into his early dramatic verse. 
Seven examples figure in 'Love's Labour's speare's 
Lost, ' probably his earliest play ^ ; both the ^^^^^3'^^^"" 
choruses in 'Romeo and Juliet' (before acts i. 
and II.) are couched in the sonnet form ; and a letter of 
the heroine Helena in ' All's Well that Ends Well,' which 
bears traces of early composition, takes the same shape 
(ill. iv. 4-17). It has, moreover, been argued ingen- 
iously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the 
somewhat clumsy sonnet, 'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' 
which prefaced in 1591 Florio's 'Second Frutes,' a series 
of Italian-English dialogues for students.^ 

^ Lovers Labour's Lost, i. i. 80-93, 163-176; iv. ii. 109-122; iii. 26- 
39,60-73; v.ii. 343-56; 402-15. 

^ Minto, Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The 
sonnet, headed 'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' runs : 

Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase, 

How fit a rival art thou of the Spring ! 

For when each branch hath left his flourishing, 
And green-locked Summer's shady pleasures cease ; . 
She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace, 

And spends her franchise on each living thing : 

The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing. 
Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release. 
So when that all our English Wits lay dead, 

(Except the laurel that is ever green) 
Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o'erspread, 

And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen. 
Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality. 
Were ne'er before brought out of Italy. 

John Florio (iS53?-i625), at first a teacher of Italian at Oxford and 
later well known in London as a lexicographer and translator, was a. 
protege of the Earl of Southampton, whose 'pay and patronage' he ac- 
knowledged in 1598 when dedicating to him his Worlde of Wordes. He 
was afterwards a beneficiary of the Earl of Pembroke. His circle of 
acquaintance included the leading men of letters of the day. Shake- 



156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the 
spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a noble- 
-j . . man's patronage for his earliest publication, 
of Shake- 'Veuus and Adonis/ that he turned to sonnet- 
sonnets teering on the regular plan, outside dramatic 
composed composition. One hundred and fifty-four 
"^ ^^^'^' sonnets survive apart from his plays, and there 
are signs that a large part of the collection was inaugu- 
rated while the two narrative poems were under way 
during 1593 and 1594 — his thirtieth and thirty-first 
years. Occasional reference in the sonnets to the 
writer's growing age was a conventional device — trace- 
able to Petrarch — of all sonnetteers of the day, and 
admits of no literal interpretation.^ In matter and in 

speare doubtless knew Florio first as Southampton's protege. He quotes 
his fine translation of Montaigne's Essays in The Tempest; see p. 429. 
Although the fact of Shakespeare's acquaintance with Florio is not 
open to question, it is responsible for at least one mistaken inference. 
Farmer and Warburton argue that Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in 
Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost. They chiefly rely on Florio's bom- 
bastic prefaces to his Worlde of Wordes and his translation of Mon- 
taigne's Essays (1603). There is nothing there to justify the suggestion. 
Florio writes more in the vein of Armado than of Holofernes, and, be- 
yond the fact that he was a teacher of languages to noblemen, he bears 
no resemblance to Holofernes, a village schoolmaster. 
^ Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets : 

My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. i). 

But when my glass shows me myself indeed, 

Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity (Mi. 9-10). 

That time of year thou may'st in me behold 

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (kxiii. 1-2). 

My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6) . 

Daniel in Delia (xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine year^ old, exclaimed : 

My years draw on my everlasting night, 
. . . My days are done. 

Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to 
whom he addressed his Affectionate Shepherd and a sequence of sonnets 
in 1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23) : 

Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs, 
My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face. 

Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (Idea, xiv.) published in 1594, when he 
was barely thirty-one, wrote : 

Looking into the glass of my youth's miseries, 

I see the ugly face of my deformed cares 

With withered brows all wrinkled with despairs ; 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 157 

manner the greater number of the poems suggest that 
they came from the pen of a man not yet middle-aged. 
Language and imagery closely connect the sonnets 
with the poetic and dramatic work which is known to 
have engaged Shakespeare's early pen. The phrase- 
ology which is matched in plays of a later period is 
smaller in extent than that which finds a parallel in the 
narrative poems of 1593 and 1594, or in the plays of 
similar date. Shakespeare's earUest comedy, 'Love's 
Labour's Lost,' seems to offer a longer Hst of parallel 
passages than any other of his works. Doubtless he 
renewed his sonnetteering efforts frorh time to time and 
at irregular intervals during the closing years of Queen 
Elizabeth's reign, although only once — in the epilogue 
of 'Henry V,' which was penned in 1599 — did he in- 
troduce the sonnet-form into his maturer dramatic verse. 
Sonnet cvii., in which reference is made to Queen Eliza- 
beth's death, may be fairly regarded as one of the latest 
acts of homage on Shakespeare's part to the importu- 
nate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, 
whether internal or external, points to the conclusion 
that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted 
on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its 
full height. 

In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably 
unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and medi- 

and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how 

Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face. 

All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton 
followed the Italian master's words more closely than their contempora- 
ries. Cf. Petrarch's Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or Sonnet Lxxxi. (to 
Laura after death) ; the latter begins : — 

Dicemi spesso il mio fiidato speglio, 

L'animo stanco e la cangiata scorza 

E la scemata mia destrezza e forza; 
Non ti nasconder piu : tu se' pur veglio. 

(i.e. 'My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my 
decajdng wit and strength repeatedly tell me: "It cannot longer be 
hidden from you, you are old."') 



158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

tative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere 
in poetry. The best examples are charged with the 
Their mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the 

literary depth of thought and feeHng, the vividness 
^^"^" . of imagery and the stimulating fervour of ex- 
pression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On 
the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath 
the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their 
excellences and' their defects Shakespeare's sonnets be- 
tray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which 
passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate 
with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. There 
is far more concentration in the sonnets than in 'Venus 
and Adonis' or in 'Lucrece,' although traces of their in- 
tensity appear in occasional utterances of Shakespeare's 
Roman heroine. The superior and more evenly sustained 
energy of the sonnets is to be attributed less to the acces- 
sion of power that comes with increase of years than to 
the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical 
exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a 
uniform condensation of thought and language. 

In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, 
Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets ; he circulated 
them in manuscript.^ But their reputation grew, and 

1 The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long cir- 
culated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as Shakespeare's 
at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating many years in 
manuscript, Sidney's Sonnets were published in 1591 by an irresponsible 
trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising dedication wrote of 
the collection that it had been widely ' spread abroad in written copies,' 
and had 'gathered much corruption by ill writers' [i.e. copyists]. Con- 
stable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty sonnets in a volume which 
he entitled 'Diana.' This was an authorised publication. But in 1594 
a printer and a publisher, without Constable's knowledge or sanction, 
reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through a volume of nearly 
eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other hands; the 
adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title of 'Diana,' 
which Constable had distinctively attached to his own collection. Daniel 
suffered in much the same way. See Appendix ix. for further notes on 
the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of circulating litera- 
ture in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to Sidney's father-in- 
law, Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret that uncorrected 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 159 

public interest was aroused in them in spite of his un- 
readiness to give them pubHcity. The melhflu- circulation 
ous verse of Richard B arnfield, which was printed in manu- 
in 1594 and 1595, assimilated many touches ^*^"^'^' 
from Shakespeare's sonnets as well as from his narrative 
poems. A line from one sonnet : 

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14) ^ 

and a phrase ' scarlet ornaments ' (for ' lips') from another 
(cxlii. 6) were both repeated in the anonymous play of 
' Edward III,' which was published in 1596 and was prob- 
ably written before 1595. Francis Meres, the critic, 
writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shake- 
speare's 'sugred^ sonnets among his private friends,' 
and mentions them in close conjunction with his two 
narrative poems.^ William Jaggard piratically inserted 
in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. 
and cxliv.) in the poetic miscellany which he deceptively 
entitled 'The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare.' 

At length, in 1609, a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets 
was surreptitiously sent to press. Thomas Thorpe, the 

manuscript copies of the then unprinted Arcadia were 'so common.' 
In 1 59 1 Gabriel Cawood, the pubhsher of Robert Southwell's Mary 
Magdalen's Funeral Tears, wrote that manuscript copies of the work 
had long flown about 'fast and false.' Nash, in the preface to his Terrors 
of the Night, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a friend 
had 'wrested' from him, had 'progressed [without his authority] from 
one scrivener's shop to another, and at length grew so common that it 
was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [i.e. shop-signs], like a 
pair of indentures.' Thorpe's bookselling friend, Edward Blount, 
gathered together, without the author's aid, the scattered essays by 
John Earle, and he published them in 1628 under the title of Micro- 
cosmographie, frankly describing them as 'many sundry dispersed tran- 
scripts, some very imperfect and surreptitious.' 
^ Cf . Sonnet Ixix. 12: 

To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds. 

^ For other instances of the application of this epithet to Shake- 
speare's work, see p. 259, note i. 

^ Meres's words run: 'As the soule of Euphorhtis was thought to 
live in Pythagoras : So the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous 
and hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, 
his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.' 



l6o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a 
camp-follower of the regular publishing army. He was 

professionally engaged in procuring for publica- 
piraticai tion literary works which had been widely dis- 
pubiication scmiuatcd in written copies, and had thus passed 

beyond their authors' control ; for the law 
then ignored any natural right in an author to the crea- 
tions of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy 
of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, 
or to treat it as he pleased, without reference to the 
author's wishes. Thorpe's career as a procurer of neg- 
lected 'copy' had begun well. He made, in 1600, his 
earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe's translation of 
the 'First Book, of Lucan.' On May 20, 1609, he ob- 
tained a license for the publication of 'Shakespeare's 
Sonnets,' and this tradesman-like form of title figured not 
only on the 'Stationers' Company's Registers,' but on 
the title-page. Thorpe employed George Eld, whose 
press was at the White Horse, in Fleet Lane, Old Bailey, 
to print the work, and two booksellers, William 
Aspley of the Parrot in St. Paul's Churchyard and John 
Wright of Christ Church Gate near Newgate, to dis- 
tribute the volume to the public. On half the- edition 
Aspley' s name figured as that of the seller, and on the 
other half that of Wright. The book was issued in 
June,^ and the owner of the ' copy ' left the public under 
no misapprehension as to his share in the production by 
printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his 
own pen. The appearance in a book of a dedication from 
the publisher's (instead of from the author's) hand was, 
unless the substitution was specifically accounted for on 
other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no 
part in the publication. Except in the case of his two 
narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594 

^ The actor Alleyn paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf . War- 
ner's Dulwich MSS. p. 92). The symbol 's*^' {i.e. fivepence) is also 
inscribed in contemporary handwriting on the title-page of the copy 
of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609) in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS l6l 

respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any 
of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the 
wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him 
of books by other hands. Such practices were encour- 
aged by his passive indifference and the contemporary 
condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited 
with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe's 
collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic 
insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending 
a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line 
stanzas entitled 'A Lover's Complaint, by William 
Shake-speare,' in which a girl laments her be- 'a Lover's 
trayal by a deceitful youth. The title is com- Com- ^ 
mon in Elizabethan poetry, and although the p^"^*^- 
metre of the Shakespearean 'Lover's Complaint' is that 
of 'Lucrece,' it has no other affinity with Shakespeare's 
poetic style. Its vein of pathos is unknown to the 
'Sonnets.' Throughout, the language is strained and 
the imagery far-fetched. Many awkward words appear 
in its lines for the first and only time, and their inven- 
tion seems due to the author's imperfect command of the 
available poetic vocabulary. Shakespeare's responsibil- 
ity for 'A Lover's Complaint' may well be questioned.^ 

A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe's preface and 
his part in the publication has encouraged many critics 
in a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare's Thomas 
poems,^ and has caused them to be accorded a J^^^^r 
place in his biography to which they have small w. h.' 

^ Cf. the present writer's introduction to the facsimile of the Sonnets, 
Clarendon Press, 1905, pp. 49-50, and, especially. Prof. J. W. Mackail's 
essay on A Lover's Complaint in Engl. Association Essays and Studies, 
vol. iii. 191 2. After a careful critical study of the poem Prof. Mackail 
questions Shakespeare's responsibility. He suggests less convincingly 
that the rival poet of the Sonnets may be the author. 

2 The present writer has published much supplementary illustration 
of the Sonnets and their history in the Introduction to the Clarendon 
Press's facsimile reproduction of the first edition of the Sonnets (1905), 
in the footnotes to the Sonnets in the Caxton Shakespeare [1909], vol. 
xix., and in The French Renaissance in England, 1910, pp. 266 seq. The 
chief recent separate editions of the Sonnets with critical apparatus 
are those of Gerald Massey (1872, reissued 1888), Edward Dowden 



1 62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

title. Thorpe's dedication was couched in the bombas- 
tic language which was habitual to him. He advertised 
Shakespeare as 'our ever-Hving poet.' As the chief 
promoter of the undertaking, he called himself in mer- 
cantile phraseology of the day, 'the well-wishing adven- 
turer in setting forth,' and in resonant phrase designated 
as the patron of the venture a partner in the speculation, 
'Mr. W. H.' In the conventional dedicatory formula 
of the day he wished 'Mr. W. H.' 'all happiness' and 
'eternity,' such eternity as Shakespeare in the text of 
the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse. 
When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe's 
'First Book of Lucan' in 1600, he sought the patronage 
of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. 'W. H.' was 
doubtless in a like position.^ When Thorpe dubbed 
'Mr. W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, 'the 
onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing 
sonnets,' he merely indicated that that personage was the 
first of the pubHshing fraternity to procure a manu- 
script of Shakespeare's sonnets,' and to make possible 
its surreptitious issue. In accordance with custom, 
Thorpe gave the procurer's initials only, because he was 
an intimate associate who was known by those initials 

(1875, reissued 1896), Thomas Tyler (1890), George Wyndham (1898), 
Samuel Butler (1899), and Dean Beeching (1904). Butler and Dean 
Beeching argue that the sonnets were addressed to an unknown youth 
of no high birth, who was the private friend, and not the patron, of the 
poet. Massey identifies the young man to whom many of the sonnets 
were addressed with the Earl of Southampton. Tyler accepts the 
identification with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Mr. C. M. 
Walsh, in Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets (1908), includes the sonnets 
from the plays, holds aloof from the conflicting theories of solution, 
arranges the poems in a new order on internal evidence only, and adds 
new and useful illustrations from classical sources. 

^ 'W. H. ' is best identified with a stationer's assistant, William Hall, 
who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring 'copy.' In 
1606 'W. H.' won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted 
his operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year 'W. H.' 
announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem — ' A 
Foure-fould Meditation' — by the Jesuit Robert Southwell, who had 
been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed 
'W. H.') vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove 
(see Appendix v.). 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 1 63 

to their common circle of friends. Thorpe's ally was not 
a man of such general reputation as to render it likely 
that the printing of his full name would excite additional 
interest in the book or attract buyers. 

It has been assumed that Thorpe in this boastful 
preface was covertly addressing, under the initials 'Mr. 
W. H./ a young nobleman, to whom (it is argued) the 
sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare. But 
this assumption ignores the elementary principles of pub- 
lishing transactions of the day, and especially of those 
of the type to which Thorpe's efforts were confined.^ 
There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from 
a modern point of view there was much that lacked 
principle, in Thorpe's methods of business. His choice 
of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated 
by his mercantile interests. He was under no induce- 
ment and in no position to take into consideration cir- 
cumstances touching Shakespeare's private affairs. " The 
poet, through all but the earliest stages of his career, 
belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassa- 
ble barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued his ques- 
tionable calling. It was outside Thorpe's aim to seek to 
mystify his customers by investing a dedication with a 
cryptic significance. 

No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which 
could be represented by the initials 'Mr. W. H.' Shake- 
speare was never on terms of intimacy (although the 

1 It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets 
cxxxv.-vi. and cxHii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some 
of the sonnets bore his own Christian name of Will (see for a full examina- 
tion of these sonnets Appendix viii.)- Further, it has been fantastically 
suggested that the friend's surname was Hughes, because of a pun sup- 
posed to lurk in the line (xx. 7) describing the youth (in the original text) 
as 'A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling' {i.e. a man in hue, or com- 
plexion, who exerts, by virtue of his fascination, control, or influence over 
the hues or complexion of all he meets). Three other applications to 
the youth of the ordinary word 'hue' (cf. 'your sweet hue,' civ. 11) are 
capriciously held to corroborate the theory. On such grounds a few 
critics have claimed that the friend's name was William Hughes. No 
known contemporary of that name, either in age or position in life, bears 
any resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shakespeare in 
his Sonnets (cf. Notes arid Queries, 5th ser. v. 443). 



164 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

contrary has often been asserted) with William (Herbert) , 
third Earl of Pembroke, when a youths But were com- 
plete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they 
would throw no light on Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.' The 
Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his 
succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy 
title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could 
not have been designated at any period of his life by the 
symbols 'Mr. W. H.' In 1609 the Earl of Pembroke was 
a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated 
to him in all the splendour of his many titles. S tar- 
Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any pub- 
lisher or author who denied him in print his titular dis- 
tinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books 
to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely 
that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory eti- 
quette, but that his tradesmanlike temperament rendered 
him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas 
of servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe's 
address to 'Mr. W. H.' belongs to the biographies of 
Thorpe and his friend ; it lies outside the scope of Shake- 
speare's biography.^ 

Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' ignore the somewhat complex 
scheme of metre adopted by Petrarch whom the Eliza- 
bethan sonnetteers, like the French and Italian 
of shak™ sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised 
Sormt^ to be in most respects their master. The 
foreign writers strictly divided their poems into 
an octave and a sestett, and they subdivided each 
octave into two quatrains, and each sestett into two 
tercets (abba, abba, cde, cde). The rhymes of the regular 
foreign pattern are so repeated as never to exceed a total 
of five, and a couplet at the close is sternly avoided. 

^ See Appendix vi., 'Mr. William Herbert'; and vii., 'Shakespeare 
and the Earl of Pembroke.' 

2 The full results of my researches into Thorpe's history, his methods 
of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of which 
four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix v., 'The True History of Thomas 
Thorpe and "Mr. W.H.'" 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 165 

Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, 
and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, 
his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than 
the Italian or the French. They consist of three deca- 
syllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet; the qua- 
trains rhyme alternately, and independently of one 
another ; the number of different rhyming syllables 
reach a total of seven {ahab cdcd efefgg) } A single sonnet 
does not always form an independent poem. As in the 
French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of 
Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train 
of thought is at times pursued continuously through two 
or more. The collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets 
thus has the aspect of a series of detached poems, many in 
a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. The longest 
sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in 
Thorpe's edition opens the volume. 

It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were 
printed follows the order in which they were written. 
Endeavours have been made to detect in want of 
the original arrangement of the poems a con- continuity. 
nected narrative, but the thread is on any showing 
constantly interrupted.^ It is usual to divide the son- 

^ The metrical structure of the fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shake- 
speare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by 
Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England 
long before he wrote. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of In- 
struction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English (published 
in Gascoigne's Posies, 1575), defined sonnets thus: 'Fouretene lynes, 
every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in 
staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, 
do conclude the whole.' In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which 
Sidney's collection entitled Astrophel and Stella consists, the rhymes 
are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these 
are exceptional. Spenser interlaces his rhymes more subtly than Shake- 
speare; but he is faithful to the closing couplet. As is not uncommon 
in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare's sonnets (xcix.) 
has fifteen lines ; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines in rhymed couplets 
(cf. Lodge's Phillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.) ; and a third (cxlv.) is in octo- 
syllabics. But it is doubtful whether the second and third of these 
sonnets rightly belong to the collection. They were probably written 
as independent lyrics : see p. 166, note i. 

2 If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of 



1 66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

nets into two groups, and to represent that all those 
numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young 
The two man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were 
'groups.' addressed to a woman. This division cannot 
be literally justified. In the first group some eighty of 
the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by 
the use of the masculine pronoun or some other un- 
equivocal sign ; but among the remaining forty there is 
no clear indication of the addressee's sex. Many of these 
forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person 
at all (cf. cv. cxvi. cxix. cxxi.). A few invoke abstractions 
like Death (Ixvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or 'benefit of ill' 
(cxix.). The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the 
first 'group,' does Httle more than sound a variation on 
the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love 
personified as a boy who is warned that he must, in due 
course, succumb to Time's inexorable law of death.^ 
And there is no valid objection to the assumption that 
the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a 
woman (cf. xxi. xlvi. xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the 
second 'group' (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform super- 
narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare's sonnets were 
applied to the booksellers' miscellany of sonnets called Diana (1594), 
that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous sub- 
jects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made 
to reveal the sequence of an individual lover's moods quite as readily, 
and, if no external bibliographical evidence were admitted, quite as 
convincingly, as Thorpe's collection of Shakespeare's sonnets. Almost 
all Elizabethan sonnets, despite their varying poetic value, are not 
merely substantially in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds 
superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost 
every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive impression 
of homogeneity. 

^ Shakespeare merely warns his 'lovely boy' that, though he be now 
the 'minion' of Nature's 'pleasure,' he will not succeed in defying Time's 
inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid as 'blind 
hitting boy,' as in his Astrophel (No. xlvi.). Cupid is similarly invoked 
in three of Drayton's sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and 
Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Ftilke Greville's 
collection entitled Calica (cf. Ixxxiv., beginning 'Farewell, sweet boy, 
complain not of my truth'). A similar theme to that of Shakespeare's 
Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song 'Love is ever dying,' 
in his tragedy of the Broken Heart, 1633. 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 167 

scription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is 
an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the 
virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on 
lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like 
Lyly's song of 'Cupid and Campaspe,' and its tone has 
close afifinity to that and other of Lyly's songs. No. 
cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv. 
soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of 
Cupid's fi.re.^ 

The choice and succession of topics in each 'group' 
give to neither genuine cohesion. In the first 'group' 
the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the . 
poet's appeal to a young man to marry so topics of 
that his youth and beauty may survive in the first 

. ,. . . group. 

children. There is almost a contradiction m 
terms between the poet's handling of that topic and his 
emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) 
that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immor- 
talising his friend's youth and accomplishments. The 
same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. 
Iv. Ix. Ixiii. Ixxiv. Ixxxi. ci. cvii.). These assurances alter- 
nate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the 
object of the poet's affections (cf . xxi. lii. Ixviii.) and de- 
scriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion 
(cf. xlviii. 1. cxiii.). There are many reflections on the 
nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xliii. Ixi.) 
and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer 
when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.). 
At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences ; he 
has sought and won the favour of the poet's mistress in 
the poet's absence, but the poet is forgiving (xxxii.-xxxv. 
xl.-xlii. Ixix. xcv.-xcvi.). In Sonnet Ixx. the young man 
whom the poet addresses is credited with a different 
disposition and experience : 

And, thou present'st a pure unstained prime. 
Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of young days, 
Either not assail'd, or victor being charg'd ! 

^ See p. 185, note 2. 



1 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

At times melancholy overwhelms the writer : he despairs 
of the corruptions of the age (Ixvi.), reproaches himself 
with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his pro- 
fession of acting (ex. cxi.), and foretells his approaching 
death (Ixxi.-lxxiv.) . Throughout are dispersed obsequious 
addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of 
the poet's verse (cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.). But in 
one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for be- 
stowing his patronage on rival poets (Ixxviii.-lxxxvi.) . In 
three sonnets near the close of the first group in the 
original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his 
constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently 
to man or woman (cf. cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.). 

In two sonnets of the second 'group' (cxxvii. cliv.) 
the poet compliments his mistress on her black complex- 
ion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve 
topics of sonnets he hotly denounces his ' dark ' mistress 
the second fgj- ]^gj. proud disdain of his affection, and for 

group. ..... 

her manifold infidelities with other men. Ap- 
parently continuing a theme of the first ' group ' the poet 
rebukes a woman for having beguiled his friend to yield 
himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.). Elsewhere 
he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compli- 
ments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. 
cxxx.), or lightly quibbles on his name of 'Will' (cxxx.- 
vi.) — the word ' will ' being capable of many meanings 
in Elizabethan EngHsh. In tone and subject-matter 
numerous sonnets in the second as in the first 'group' 
lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately 
precede or follow. 

It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes 
the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of 
a logical continuity in Thorpe's arrangement of the poems 
in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers 
and pubHshers of the seventeenth century acknowledged 
no sort of significance in the order in which the poems 
first saw the fight. When the sonnets were printed for 
a second time in 1640 — thirty-one years after their first 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 169 

appearance — they were presented in a completely dif- 
ferent order.^ The short descriptive titles which were 
then supplied to single sonnets or to short unbroken 
sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a 
disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less 
• amorous vein. 

In whatever order Shakespeare's sonnets be studied, 
the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank 
as autobiographical documents can only be -^ , , 
accepted with many qualifications. The fact genuine 
that they create in many minds the illusion {^^£1^^-* 
of a series of earnest personal confessions bethan 
does not justify their treatment by the biog- ^°°^^*^- 
rapher as self-evident excerpts from the poet's auto- 
biography. Shakespeare's mind was dominated and en- 
grossed by genius for drama, and his supreme mastery 
of dramatic power renders it unlikely that any production 
of his pen should present an unqualified piece of auto- 
biography. The emotion of the sonnets may on a priori 
grounds well owe much to that dramatic instinct which 
reproduced intuitively in the plays the subtlest thought 
and feeling of which man's mind is capable. In his 
drama Shakespeare acknowledged that ' the truest poetry 
is the most feigning.' The exclusive embodiment in 
verse of mere private introspection was barely known to 
his era, and in this phrase the dramatist paid an explicit 
tribute to the potency in poetic literature of artistic 
impulse and control contrasted with the impotency of 
personal sensation, which is scarcely capable of discipline. 
To few of the sonnets can a controlling artistic impulse 
be denied by criticism. To pronounce them, alone of his 
extant work, wholly free of that 'feigning,' which he 
identified with 'the truest poetry,' is almost tantamount 
to denying his authorship of them, and to dismissing 
them from the Shakespearean canon. 

In spite of their poetic superiority to those of his 
contemporaries, Shakespeare's sonnets cannot be dis- 

1 See p. 544 infra. 



lyo WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

sociated from the class of poetic endeavour with 
which they were identified in Shakespeare's own time. 
Elizabethan sonnets of all degrees of merit were 
commonly the artificial products of the poet's fancy. 
A strain of personal emotion is discernible in a 
detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few- 
sequences ; but autobiographical confessions were not 
the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. 
The typical collection of Elizabethan sonnets was a 
mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative or assimi- 
lative studies. Echoes of the French or of the ItaHan 
sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually 
the dominant notes. The echoes often have a musical 
quality peculiar to themselves. Daniel's fine sonnet 
(xlix.) on 'Care-charmer sleep,' although directly in- 
spired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the 

sonnet of Pierre de Brach ^ apostrophising 'le 
pendenc^e sommcil chassc-soiu ' (in the collection entitled 
on French ' Les Amours d'Aymcc ') , or the sonnet of 
models^ ^^^ Philippe Desportes invoking 'Sommeil, paisible 

fils de la nuit solitaire ' (in the collection en- 
titled 'Amours d'Hippoly te ') . But, throughout Eliza- 
bethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to classical 
Italian and French effort is unmistakable.^ Spenser, 
in 1569, at the outset of his literary career, avowedly 
translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from 
Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him 
the title of ' an Enghsh Petrarch ' — the highest praise 
that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an 
English sonnetteer.^ Thomas Watson in 1582, in his 

^ 1547-1604. Cf. De Brach, CEuvres Poetiques, edited by Reinhold 
Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60. 

^ See Appendices ix. and x. Of the vastness of the debt that the 
Elizabethan sonnet owed to foreign poets, a fuller estimate is given by 
the present writer in his preface to Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols. 1904), 
in the revised edition of Arber's English Garner. 

^ Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after 
enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch's sonnets ('Petrarch's invention 
is pure love itself; Petrarch's elocution pure beauty itself), justifies the 
common English practice of imitating them on the ground that 'all the 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 171 

collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he en- 
titled 'EKATOMHAQIA, or A Passionate Century of 
Love,' prefaced each poem, which he termed a 'passion,' 
with a prose note of its origin and intention. Watson 
frankly informed his readers that one 'passion' was 
'wholly translated out of Petrarch'; that in another 
passion ' he did very busily imitate and augment a certain 
ode of Ronsard'; while 'the sense or matter of "a 
third" was taken out of Serafino in his "Strambotti."' 
In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his 
foreign original, and frequently appended a quotation.^ 

noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins 
Petrarchized ; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse 
to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocu- 
tion acknowledge their master.' Both French and English sonnetteers 
habitually admit that they are open to the charge of plagiarising Pe- 
trarch's sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay's Les Amours, ed. Becq de 
Fouquieres, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel's Delia, Sonnet xxxviii.). The 
dependent relations in which both English and French sonnetteers 
stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a popular 
sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions Ixxxviii.) 
in Sonetti in Vita di M. Laura, beginning 'S' amor non 6, che dimque 
e quel ch' i' sento?' with a rendering of it into French like that of De 
Baif in his Amours de Francine (ed. Becq de Fouquieres, p. 121), be- 
ginning, 'Si ce n'est pas Amour, que sent donques mon coeur?' or with 
a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in his 
Passionate Century, No. v., beginning, 'If 't bee not love I feele, what 
is it then?' Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of the 
English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the 
earliest efforts of Surray and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the 
skill of the early and late sonnetteers in rendering the Italian master. 
Petrarch's sonnet In vita di M. Laura (No. Ixxx. or Ixxxi., beginning 
'Cesare, poi che '1 traditor d' Egitto') was independently translated 
both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about 1530 (ed. BeU, p. 60), and by Francis 
Davison in his Poetical Rhapsody (1602, ed. Bullen, i. 90). Petrarch's 
sonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii., beginning 'Pommi ove '1 Sol uccide i fiori e 
r erba ') was also rendered independently both by Wyatt (cf . Putten- 
ham's Arte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 231) and by Drummond of 
Hawthornden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221). 

^ Eight of Watson's sonnets are, according to his own account, ren- 
derings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino deU' Aquila (1466- 
1500) ; four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from Ron- 
sard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two 
each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus 
(i5i4?-i573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco {fl. 1548), and ^neas 
Sylvius ; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among 
the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, ApoUonius of Rhodes (author of 



172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collec- 
tion of sonnets entitled 'Idea,' declared that it was 'a 
fault too common in this latter time' 'to filch from 
Desportes or from Petrarch's pen.' ^ Lodge did not 
acknowledge his many literal borrowings from Ronsard 
and Ariosto, but he made a plain profession of indebted- 
ness to Desportes when he wrote : Tew men are able to 
second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose 
poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand.' ^ 
Dr. Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called 
'Licia' (1593) simulated the varying moods of a lover 
under the sway of a great passion as successfully as most 
of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were 
all written in 'imitation of the best Latin poets and 
others.' Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of 
sixty-eight penned ten years later by William Drum- 
mond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources 
not merely in the Italian sonnets of Petrarch, and the 
sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Bat- 
tista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro, but in the French 
verse of Ronsard, of his colleagues of the Pleiade, and of 
their half -forgotten disciples.^ The Elizabethans usually 

the epic 'Argonautica') ; or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, 
Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus, 
or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and 
Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516) ; or (among other modern French- 
men) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner 
of Virgil and Mantuanus. 

^ No importance can be attached to Drayton's pretensions to greater 
originality than his rivals. The very line in which he makes the claim 
('I am no pick-purse of another's wit') is a verbatim quotation from a 
sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney {Astrophel and Stella, Ixxiv. 8), and is origi- 
nally from an epigram of Persius. 

2 Lodge's Margarite, p. 79. See Appendix ix. for the text of Des- 
portes's sonnet {Diana, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge's translation in 
Phillis. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of Des- 
portes — in his romance of Rosalind (Hunterian Society's reprint, 
p. 74), and in his volume of poems called Scillaes Metamorphosis (p. 44). 
Many sonnets in Lodge's Phillis are rendered with equal literalness 
from Ronsard, Ariosto, Paschale, and others. 

^ See Drummond's Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses' Library, 1894, 
i. 207 seq. ; and The Poetical Works of William Drummond, ed. L. E. 
Kastner (Manchester University Press), 1913, 2 vols. 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 173 

gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes 
of sonnets were called the names that had recently served 
the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice 
Seve ^ in christening his collection 'Delia'; Constable 
followed Desportes in christening his collection 'Diana'; 
while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his 
title-page in 1594 the French term 'Amours,' but be- 
stowed on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which 
seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux,^ 
although it was employed by other French contemporaries. 
With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public 
that 'no inward touch' was to be expected from sonnet- 
teers of his day, whom he describes as 

[Men] that do dictionary's method bring 
Into their rhymes running in rattling rows ; 
[Men] that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes 
With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing. 

Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his 
own experiments. But 'even amorous sonnets in the 
gallantest and sweetest civil vein,' wrote Gabriel Harvey 
in 'Pierces Supererogation' in 1593, 'are but 
dainties of a pleasurable wit.' Drayton's son- teers'^ad- 
nets more nearly approached Shakespeare's in missions of 

insinccntv 

quality than those of any contemporary. Yet 
Drayton told the readers of his collection entitled 'Idea'^ 

^ Seve's Delie was first published at Lyons in 1544. 

2 Pontoux's L'Idee was published at Lyons in 1579, just after the 
author's death. 

^ In two of his century of sonnets (Nos. xiii. and xxiv. in the 1594 
edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton asserts 
that his 'fair Idea' embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his ac- 
quaintance (see p. 466 infra), and he repeats the statement in two other 
short poems; but the fundamental principles of his sonnetteering ex- 
ploits are deiined explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in the 1594 edition. 

Some, when in rhyme, they of their loves do tell, . . . 
Only I call [i.e. I call only] on my divine Idea. 

Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton 
in addressing sonnets to 'L'Idee,' left the reader in no doubt of his in- 
tent by concluding one poem thus : 

La, 6 mon ame, au plus hault del guidee 

Tu y pourras recognoistre I'ldee 

De la beaute qu'en ce monde j'adore. 

(Du Bellay's Olive, No. cxiii., published in 1568.) 



174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

(after the French) that if any sought genuine passion 
in them, they had better go elsewhere. 'In all 
humours sportively he ranged/ he declared. Dr. Giles 
Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative 
sonnets entitled 'Licia, or Poems of Love,' with the 
warning, 'Now in that I have written love sonnets, if 
any man measure my affection by my style, let him 
say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . 
a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as 
of husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches 
and be none, or of holiness and be profane.' ^ 

The dissemination of false or artificial sentiment by 
the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical 
p^j^j. treatment of 'the pangs of despised love' or 

porary the joys of requited affection, did not escape 
soim^t-°^ the censure of contemporary criticism. The 
teers' false air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the 
sentiment. ^^^^^ respected writers of the day. In early 
life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of 
adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet- 
sequence in his 'Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The 
Student's Loove or Hatrid.' ^ Chapman in 1595, in a 
series of sonnets entitled 'A Coronet for his mistress 
Philosophy,' appealed to his literary comrades to aban- 
don ' the painted cabinet ' of the love-sonnet for a coffer 
of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors 
of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir 
John Davies. In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his 
friend Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton's 
' Idea ') he inveighed against the ' bastard sonnets ' which 
'base rhymers' 'daily' begot 'to their own shames and 
poetry's disgrace.' In his anxiety to stamp out the folly 
he wrote and circulated in manuscript a specimen series 

^ Ben Jonson, echoing without acknowledgment an Italian critic's 
epigram (cf. Athenceum, July 9, 1904), told Drummond of Hawthornden 
that 'he cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets which he said 
were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, 
others too long cut short' (Jonson's Conversations, p. 4). 

2 See p. 194 infra. 



LITERARY HISTORY OF THE SONNETS 1 75 

of nine ' gulling sonnets ' or parodies of the conventional 
efforts.^ Even Shakespeare does not seem to have 
escaped Davies's condemnation. Sir John is 'Gulling 
especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled Sonnets.' 
conceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth 
'gulling sonnet,' in which he ridicules the application of 
law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been 
suggested by Shakespeare's legal phraseology in his 
Sonnets Ixxxvii. and cxxiv.^ ; while Davies's Sonnet ix., 
beginning : 

To love, my lord, I do knight's service owe 

must have parodied Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., begin- 
ning: 

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage, &c.* 

Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious 
to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare 
himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays, gj^^j^^ 
'Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,' speare's 
exclaims Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' allusions to 
(iv. iii. 158). In the 'Two Gentlemen of sonnets in 
Verona' (iii. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch '^p^^^- 
in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which 
Proteus offers the amorous Duke : 

You must lay lime to tangle her desires 

By wailful sonnets whose composed rime 

Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . . 

Say that upon the altar of her beauty 

You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart. 

Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respect- 
fully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo : ' Now 
is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in : Laura, 
to his lady, was but a kitchen- wench. Marry, she had 

1 They were first printed by Dr. Grosart for the Chetham Society 
in 1873 ii^ his edition of 'the Dr. Farmer MS.,' a sixteenth and seven- 
teenth century commonplace book preserved in the Chetham Library 
at Manchester, pt. i. pp. 76-81. Dr. Grosart also included the poems 
in his edition of Sir John Davies's Works, 1876, ii. 53-62. 

^ Davies's Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix ix. 

^ See p. 198 infra. 



176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

a better love to be-rhyme her.' ^ In later plays Shake- 
speare's disdain of the sonnet is equally pronounced. In 
'Henry V (iii. vii. t^t, et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestow- 
ing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his 
charger, remarks, ' I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and 
begun thus: "Wonder of nature!"' The Duke of 
Orleans retorts : ' I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's 
mistress.' The Dauphin replies : ' Then did they imitate 
that which I composed to my courser ; for my horse is 
my mistress.' In 'Much Ado about Nothing' (v. ii. 
4-7) Margaret, Hero's waiting-woman, mockingly asks 
Benedick to 'write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.' 
Benedick jestingly promises one 'in so high a style that 
no man living shall come over it,' Subsequently (v. 
iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his 
friends, of penning 'a halting sonnet of his own pure 
brain' in praise of Beatrice. 

The claim of Sidney,- Drayton, and others that their 
efforts were free of the fantastic insincerities of fellow 
„, , practitioners was repeated by Shakespeare, 

speareand Morc than oucc in his sonnets Shakespeare 
vention'ai declares that his verse is innocent of the 
profession 'strained touches' of rhetoric (Ixxxii. 10), of 
o sincerity. ^^^ 'proud' and 'false compares' (xxi. and 
cxxx.), of the 'newfound methods' and 'compounds 
strange ' (Ixxvi. 4) — which he imputes to the sonnetteer- 
ing work Of contemporaries.^ Yet Shakespeare modestly 
admits elsewhere (Ixxvi. 6) that he keeps 'invention in a 
noted weed' [i.e. he is faithful to the normal style]. 
Shakespeare's protestations of veracity are not always 
distinguishable from the like assurances of other EUza- 
bethan sonnetteers. 

1 Romeo and Juliet, ir. iv. 41-4. 

^ Cf. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet iii., where the poet affirms 
that his sole inspiration is his beloved's natural beauty. 

Let dainty wits cry on the Sisters nine . • . . 
Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old, 
Or with strange similes enrich each line . . . 
Phrases and problems from my reach do grow. . . . 



XI 

THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 

At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare's 
sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions 
than those of any contemporary, but when 
allowance has been made for the current con- autoblo- 
ventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well graphical 

J- or 1 > 1 1 iS • element in 

as for Shakespeare s unapproached ainuence m shake- 
dramatic instinct and invention — an affluence speare's 

sonnets. 

which enabled him to identify himself with 
every phase of human emotion — the autobiographic 
element, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is 
seen to shrink to slender proportions. As soon as the 
collection of Shakespeare's sonnets is studied compara- 
tively with the many thousand poems of cognate theme 
and form that the printing-presses of England, France, 
and Italy poured forth during the last years of the six- 
teenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare's perform- 
ances prove to be little more than trials of skill, often of 
superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged 
by the poetic effort of his own or of past ages at home and 
abroad. Francis Meres, the critic of 1598, adduced 
not merely Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' and his 
' Lucrece ' but also ' his sugared sonnets ' as evidence that 
'the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in melHfiuous and 
honey-tongued Shakespeare.' Much of the poet's thought 
in the sonnets bears obvious trace of vidian inspiration. 
But Ovid was only one of many nurturing forces. 
Echoes of Plato's ethereal message filled the air of EHza- 
bethan poetry. Plato, Ovid, Petrarch, Ronsard, and 
Desportes (among foreign authors of earlier time), Sidney, 

N 177 



1 78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Watson, Constable, and Daniel (among native contem- 
poraries) seem to have quickened Shakespeare's sonnet- 
rpjjg teering energy in much the same fashion as his- 

imitative torical Writings, romances or plays of older and 
e emen . contemporary date ministered to his dramatic 
activities. Of Petrarch's and Ronsard's sonnets scores 
were accessible to Shakespeare in English renderings, but 
there are signs that to Ronsard and to some of Ronsard's 
fellow countrymen Shakespeare's debt was often as direct 
as to tutors of his own race. Adapted or imitated ideas 
or conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare's 
collection. The transference is usually manipulated 
with consummate skill. Shakespeare invariably gives 
more than he receives, yet his primal indebtedness is 
rarely in doubt. It is just to interpret somewhat Hterally 
Shakespeare's own modest criticism of his sonnets (Ixxvi. 
ii"-i2) : 

So all my best is dressing old words new, 
Spending again what is already spent. 

The imitative or assimilative element in Shakespeare's 
'sugared sonnets' is large enough to refute the assertion 
. that in them as a whole he sought to 'unlock 
ofautobio- his heart.' ^ Few of the poems have an indis- 
confessions P^^ablc right to be regarded as untutored 
cries of the soul. It is true that the sonnets 
in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or gives 
expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a con- 
vincing illusion of autobiographic confessions. But the 
energetic lines in which the poet appears to betray his 
inmost introspections are often adaptations of the less 
forcible and less coherent utterances of contemporary 
poets, and the ethical or emotional themes are common 

1 Wordsworth in his sonnet on The Sonnet (1827) claimed that 'With 
this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart ' — a judgment which Robert 
Browning, no mean psychologist or literary scholar, strenuously at- 
tacked in the two poems At the Mermaid and House (1876). Browning 
cited in the latter poem Wordsworth's assertion, adding the gloss : 'Did 
Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he ! ' 



THE CONCEITS OF. THE SONNETS 1 79 

to almost all Elizabethan collections of sonnets.^ Shake- 
speare's noble sonnet on the ravages of lust (cxxix.), for 
example, treats with marvellous force and insight a 
stereotyped topic of sonnetteers, and it may have owed 
its immediate cue to Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet on 
'Desire.' 2 

Plato's ethereal conception of beauty which Petrarch 
first wove into the sonnet web became under the in- 
fluence of the metaphysical speculation of the shake- 
Renaissance a dominant element of the love speare's 
poetry of sixteenth century Italy and France, concep- 
In Shakespeare's England, Spenser was Plato's t^^'^^- 
chief poetic apostle. But Shakespeare often caught in 
his sonnets the Platonic note with equal subtlety. Plato's 
disciples greatly elaborated their master's conception of 
earthly beauty as a reflection or ' shadow ' of a heavenly 
essence or 'pattern' which, though immaterial, was the 
only true and perfect 'substance.' Platonic or neo- 
Platonic ' ideas ' are the source of Shakespeare's metaphy- 
sical questionings (Sonnet liii. 1-4) : 

^ The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix. : 

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, 
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within, 

adopts expressions in Barnabe Barnes's sonnet (No. xlix.), where, after 
denouncing his mistress as a 'siren,' that poet incoherently ejaculates: 

From my love's limbeck [sc. have I] still [di]stilled tears ! 

Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded 
from time to time in Petrarch's sonnets. Tasso in Scelta delle Rime, 
1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning 'Vinca fortuna homai, se 
sotto il peso') which adumbrates Shakespeare's Sonnets xxix. ('When 
in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes') and Ixvi. ('Tired with all 
these, for restful death I cry'). Drummond of Hawthornden translated 
Tasso's sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.) ; while Drummond's 
Sonnets xxv. ('What cruel star into this world was brought') and xxxii. 
(' If crost with aU mishaps be my poor life ') are pitched in the identical 
key. 

^ Sidney's Certain Sonnets (No. xiii.) appended to Astrophel and 
Stella in the edition of 1598. In Emaricdiilfe: Sonnets written by E. C. 
1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning 'O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,' 
even more closely resembles Shakespeare's sonnet in both phraseology 
and sentiment. E. C.'s rare volume is reprinted in the Lamport Gar- 
land (Roxburghe Club), 1881. 



l8o WILLIAM. SHAKESPEARE 

What is your substance, whereof are you made 
That millions of strange shadows on you tend ? 
Since every one hath, every one, one shade, 
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.^ 

Again, when Shakespeare identifies truth with beauty ^ 
and represents both entities as independent of matter 
or time, he is proving his loyalty to the mystical creed 
of the Grseco-Italian Renaissance, which Keats subse- 
quently summarised in the familiar lines : 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty ; that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

Shakespeare's favourite classical poem, Ovid's 'Meta- 
morphoses,' which he and his generation knew well in 

Golding's English version, is directly responsible 
to Ovid's for a more tangible thread of philosophical 
cosmic speculation which, after the manner of other 

contemporary poets, Shakespeare also wove 
dispersedly into the texture of his sonnets.^ In varied 
periphrases he confesses to a fear that 'nothing' is 
' new ' ; that ' that which is hath been before ' ; that 
Time, being in a perpetual state of 'revolution,' is for 
ever reproducing natural phenomena in a regular rota- 
tion ; that the most impressive efforts of Time, which the 
untutored mind regards as ' novel ' or ' strange ' ' are but 
dressings of a former sight,' merely the rehabilitations 
of a past experience, which fades only to repeat itself at 
some future epoch. 

The metaphysical argument has only a misty relevance 
to the poet's plea of everlasting love for his friend. The 

1 The main philosophic conceits of the Sonnets are easily traced to 
their sources. See J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Poetry (New 
York, 1903) ; George Wyndham, The Poems of Shakespeare (London, 
1898), p. cxxii. seq. ; Lilian Winstanley, Introduction to Spenser's 
Foure Hymnes (Cambridge, 1907). 

2 Cf. 'Thy end is truth and beauty's doom and date' (Sonnet xiv. 4). 

'Both truth and beauty on my love depend' (ci. 3) ; cf. liv. 1-2. 
^ The debt of Shakespeare's sonnets to Ovid's Metamorphoses has 
been worked out in detail by the present writer in an article in the 
Quarterly Review, April, 1909. 



THE CONCEITS OE THE SONNETS l8l 

poet fears that Nature's rotatory processes rob his pas- 
sion of the stamp of originahty. The reahty and in- 
dividuahty of passionate experience appear to be pre- 
judiced by the classical doctrine of universal 'revolution.' 
With no very coherent logic he seeks refuge from his 
depression in an arbitrary claim on behalf of his friend 
and himself to personal exemption from Nature's and 
Time's universal law which presumes an endless recur- 
rence of 'growth' and 'waning.' 

It is from the last book of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' 
that Shakespeare borrows his cosmic theory which, 
echoing Golding's precise phrase, he defines in ghake- 
one place as 'the conceit of this inconstant speare's 
stay ' ^ (xv. 9) , and which he christens elsewhere phys*i^/ 
'nature's changing course' (xviii. 8), 'revolu- graphy. 
tion' (lix. 12), 'interchange of state' (Ixiv. 9), and 'the 
course of altering things' (cxv. 8). But even more 
notable is Shakespeare's literal conveyance from Ovid 
or from Ovid's English translator of the Latin writer's 
physiographic illustrations of the working of the alleged 
rotatory law. Ovid's graphic appeal to the witness of 
the sea wave's motion — ■ 

As every wave drives others forth, and that that comes behind 
Both thrusteth and is thrust himself; even so the times by kind 
Do fly and follow both at once and evermore renew — 

is loyally adopted by Shakespeare in the fine lines : 

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 

So do our minutes hasten to their end ; 
Each changing place with that which goes before, 

In sequent toil all forwards do contend. — Sonnet Ix. 1-4. 

Similarly Shakespeare reproduces Ovid's vivid de- 
scriptions of the encroachments of land on sea and sea 
on land which the Latin poet adduces from professedly 

^ Golding, Ovid's Elizabethan translator, when he writes of the 
Ovidian theory of Nature's unending rotation, repeatedly employs a 
negative periphrasis, of which the word 'stay' is the central feature. 
Thus he asserts that 'in all the world there is not that that standeth 
at a stay,' and that 'our bodies' and 'the elements never stand at stay.' 



1 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

personal observation as further evidence of matter's 
endless rotations. Golding's lines run : 

Even so have places oftentimes exchanged their estate, 
For / have seen it sea which was substantial ground alate: 
Again where sea was, / have seen the same become dry land. 

This passage becomes under Shakespeare's hand : 

When / have seen the hungry ocean gain 

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, 
And the firm soil win of the watery main 

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store ; 
When / have seen such interchange of state. — (Sonnet Ixiv.) 

Shakespeare has no scruple in claiming to 'have seen' 
with his own eyes the phenomena of Ovid's narration. 
Shakespeare presents Ovid's doctrine less confidently 
than the Latin writer. In Sonnet lix. he wonders whether 
'five hundred courses of the sun' result in progress or 
in retrogression, or whether they merely bring things 
back to the precise point of departure (11. 13-14). Yet, 
despite Shakespeare's hesitation to identify himself cate- 
gorically with the doctrine of 'revolution,' the fabric of 
his speculation is Ovid's gift. 

In the same Ovidian quarry Shakespeare may have 
found another pseudo-scientific theory on which he 
other meditates in the Sonnets — xliv. and xlv. — the 

philosophic notion that man is an amalgam of the four 
conceits. elements, earth, water, air, and fire ; but that 
superstition was already a veteran theme of the sonnet- 
teers at home and abroad, and was accessible to Shake- 
speare in many places outside Ovid's pages. ^ In Sonnet 
cvi. Shakespeare argues that the splendid praises of 
beauty which had been devised by poets of the past 
anticipated the eulogies which his own idol inspired. 

So all their praises are hut prophecies 

Of this our time, all you prefiguring; 
And, for they look'd but with divining eyes. 

They had not skill enough your worth to sing. 

^ Cf. Spenser, Iv. ; Barnes's Farthenophe and Parthenophil, Ixxvii. ; 
Fulke Greville's Ccdica, No. vii. 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 1 83 

The conceit which has Platonic or neo-Platonic af- 
finities may well be accounted another gloss on Ovid's 
cosmic philosophy. But Henry Constable, an English 
sonnetteer, who wrote directly under continental guid- 
ance, would here seem to have given Shakespeare an 
immediate cue : 

Miracle of the world, I never will deny- 
That former poets praise the beauty of their days ; 
But all these beauties ivere but figures of thy praise, 
And all those poets did of thee but prophesy} 

Another of Shakespeare's philosophic fancies — 
thought's nimble triumphs over space (xliv. 7-8) — is 
clothed in language which was habitual to Tasso, Ron- 
sard, and their followers.^ 

The simpler conceits wherewith Shakespeare illustrates 
love's working under the influence of spring or summer, 
night or sleep, often appear to echo in deepened Amorous 
notes Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baif, and Des- conceits, 
portes, or English disciples of the Italian and French 
masters.^ In Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops the 

1 In his Miscellaneous Sonnets (No. vii.) written about 1590 (see 
Hazlitt's edition, 1859, p. 27) — not in his Diana. Constable significantly 
headed his sonnet : ' To his Mistrisse, upon occasion of a Petrarch he 
gave her, showing her the reason why the Italian commentators dissent 
so much in the exposition thereof.' 

^ Cf. Ronsard's Amours, i. clxviii. ('Ce fol penser, pour s'envoler 
trop hant'); Du Bellay's Olive, xliii. ('Penser volage, et leger comme 
vent'); Amadis Jamyn, Sonnet xxi. ('Penser, qui peux en un moment 
grande erre courir') ; and Tasso's Rime (1583, Venice, i. p. 33) ('Come 
s' human pensier di giunger tenta Al luogo ') . 

^ Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of 
the poet's love (cf. Shakespeare's Sonnets xcviii. xcix.) play variations 
on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch's well-known sonnet xlii., 
'In morte di M. Laura,' beginning : 

Zefiro torna e '1 bel tempo rimena, 

E i fieri e F erbe, sua dolce famiglia, 

E garrir Progne e pianger Filomena, 

E primavera Candida e vermiglia. 
Ridono i prati, e '1 ciel si rasserena; 

Glove s' allegra di mirar sua figlia ; 
L' aria e V acqua e la terra e d' amor piena; 

Ogni animal d' amar si rlconslglla. 
Ma per me, lasso, tornano 1 piu gravl 

Sosplrl, che del cor profondo tragge, &c. 



1 84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

old-fashioned fancy to which Ronsard gave a new lease 
of life, that his love's portrait is painted on his heart; 
and in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard's 
phraseology in describing how his friend, who has just 
made him a gift of 'tables,' is ' character'd ' in his brain.^ 
Again Constable may be credited with suggesting 
Shakespeare's Sonnet xcix., where the flowers are re- 
proached with stealing their charms from the features 
of the poet's love. Constable had published in 1592 
an identically turned compliment in honour of his 
poetic mistress Diana (Sonnet xvii.). Two years later 
Drayton issued a sonnet in which he fancied that his 
'fair Muse' added one more to 'the old nine.' Shake- 
speare adopted the conceit (xxxviii. 9-10 :) 

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth 
Than those old nine, which rhymers invocate.^ 

In two or three instances Shakespeare engaged in the 
literary exercise of offering alternative renderings of the 
same conventional conceit. In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. 
he paraphrases twice over — appropriating many of Wat- 
son's words — the unexhilarating notion that the eye 
and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the 

See a translation by William Drummond of Hawthornden in Sonnets, 
pt. ii. No. ix. Similar sonnets and odes on April, spring, and summer 
abound in French and English (cf. Becq de Fouquiere's (Euvres choisies 
de J.- A. de Baif, passim, and CEuvres choisies des Contemporains de 
Ronsard, p. 108 (by Remy Belleau), p. 129 (by Amadis Jamyn) et passim). 
For descriptions of night and sleep see especially Ronsard's Amours 
(livre i. clxxxvi., livre ii. xxii. ; Odes, Hvre iv. No. iv., and his Odes Re- 
tranchees in CEuvres, edited by Blanchemain, ii. 392-4). Cf. Barnes's 
Parthenophe and Parthenophil, Ixxxiii. cv. 

1 Cf. Ronsard's Amours, livre i. clxxviii. ; Sonnets pour Astree, vi. 
The latter opens : 

II ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettes 
Pour vous graver que celles de mon coeur 
Ou de sa main Amour, nostre vainqueur, 
Vous a gravee et vos graces parfaites. 

2 See Drayton's Ideas Mirrovr, 1594, Amour 8. Drayton represents 
that his ladylove adds one to the nine angels and the nine worthies as 
well as to the nine muses. Sir John Davies severely castigated this 
extravagance in his Epigram In Decium. Cf. Jonson's Conversations 
•with Drummond (Shakespeare Soc, p. 15). 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 185 

greater influence on lovers.^ In the concluding sonnets, 
cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue 
illustrating the potency of love which first figured in 
the Greek Anthology, had been translated into Latin, 
and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and 
ItaHan sonnetteers.^ 

Two themes of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' both of which, 
in spite of their different calibre, touch rather more 
practical issues than any which have yet been 
cited — the duty of marriage on the one hand ^f '^un-^"^^ 
and the immortality of poetry on the other — fii"^^y ^ 
present with exceptional coherence definite 
phases of contemporary sentiment. The seventeen open- 
ing sonnets in which the poet urges a youth to marry, 
and to bequeath his beauty to posterity, repeat the plea of 
'unthrifty loveliness,' which is one of the commonplaces 
of Renaissance poetry.^ As a rule the appeal is ad- 
dressed by earlier poets to a woman. Yet in Guarini's 
world-famous pastoral drama of 'Pastor Fido' (1585) a 

^ A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare's Sonnet xxiv. Ron- 
sard's Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the 
heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet 
Iv. or Ixiii. ('Occhi, piangete, acc9mpagnate il core') is a dialogue be- 
tween the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a com- 
panion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson's Tears 
of Fancie, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely resembles 
Shakespeare's pair) ; Drayton's Idea, xxxiii. ; Barnes's Parthenophe 
and Parthenophil, xx., and Constable's Diana, vi. 7. 

2 The Greek epigram is in Palatine Anthology, ix. 627, and is translated 
into Latin in Selecta Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, 
as in Shakespeare's sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench loves' 
torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added 
detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the 
epigram in Giles Fletcher's Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet's 
Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that 'she touched 
the water and it burnt with Love,' but also 

Now by her means it purchased hath that bliss 
Which all diseases quickly can remove. 

Similarly Shakespeare in Sonnet cliv. not merely states that the 'cool 
weir into which Cupid's torch had fallen 'from Love's fire took heat 
perpetual,' but also that it grew 'a bath and healthful remedy for men 
diseased.' 

^ The common conceit may owe something to Ovid's popular Ars 
Amatoria, where appear the lines ; 



1 86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

young man, Silvio, who is the hero of the poem, receives 
the warning of Shakespeare's sonnets, while in Sir Philip 
Sidney' J 'Arcadia' (Book iii.) in one place a young man 
and in another a young woman are severally reminded 
that their beauty, which will perish unless it be repro- 
duced, lays them under the obligation of marrying. 
Italian and French sonnetteers developed the conceit 
on lines which Shakespeare varied little.^ Nor did 
Shakespeare show in the sonnets his first famiharity 
with the widespread theme. Thrice in his 'Venus and 
Adonis' does Venus fervently urge on Adonis the duty 
of propagating his charm (cf. lines 129-132, 162-174, 
751-768), and a fair maiden is admonished of the like 
duty in 'Romeo and Juliet' (i. i. 218-228).^ 

It is abundantly proved that a gentle modesty was 
an abiding note of Shakespeare's character. In the nu- 
_, , merous sonnets in which he boasted that his 

speare's vcrse was SO Certain of immortality that it was 
[mr^r-°^ Capable of immortahsing the person to whom 
taiityfor it was addrcsscd, he therefore gave voice to 
his sonnets. ^^ conviction that was pecuhar to his mental 
constitution. He was merely proving his supreme mas- 
tery of a theme which Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Des- 
portes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other 
classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the 
poetry of Europe.^ Sir Philip Sidney, in his 'Apologie 

Carpite florem 
Qui, nisi carptus erit, turpiter ipse cadet, (iii. 79-80). 

Erasmus presents the argument in full in his Colloquy 'Proci et Puellae,' 
and Sir Thomas Wyatt notices it in his poem 'That the season of en- 
joyment is short.' 

^ See French Renaissance in England, pp. 268-9. 

2 Cf. also All's Well, i. i. 136, and Twelfth Night, i. v. 273-5, where 
the topic is treated more cursorily. Shakespeare abandons the conceit 
in his later work. 

^ In Greek poetry the topic is treated in Pindar's Olympic Odes, xi., 
and in a fragment by Sappho, No. 16 in Bergk's Poetce Lyrici Graci. 
In Latin poetry the topic is treated in Ennius as quoted in Cicero, De 
Senectute, c. 207 ; in Virgil's Georgics, iii. 9 ; in Propertius, iii. i ; and in 
Martial, x. 27 seq. But it is the versions of Horace {Odes, iii. 30) and 
of Ovid {Metamorphoses, xv. 871 seq.) which the poets of the sixteenth 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 187 

for Poetrie' (1595), wrote that it was the common habit 
of poets ' to tell you that they will make you immortal by 
their verses.' ^ Men of great calling,' Nashe declared in 
his 'Pierce Pennilesse,' 1593, 'take it of merit to have 
their names eternised by poets.' ^ In the hands of 
EHzabethan sonnetteers the 'eternising' faculty of their 
verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic. 
Spenser wrote of his mistress in his 'Amoretti' (1595, 
Sonnet Ixxv.) : 

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, 
And in the heavens write your glorious name.^ 

century adapted most often. In French and English literature numer- 
ous traces survive of Horace's far-famed ode (iii. 30) : 

Exegi monumentum asre perennius 
Regalique situ pyramidum altiiis, 
Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens 
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis 
Annorum series, et fuga temporum. 

as well as of the lines which end Ovid's Metamorphoses (xv. 871-9). 

JamqUe opus exegi, quod nee Jovis ira nee ignes, 
Nee poterit ferrum, nee edax abolere vetustas. 
Cum volet ilia dies, qus nil nisi corporis hujus 
Jus habet, incerti spa turn mihi finiat aevi ; 
Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis 
Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. 

Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly, 
although Du Bellay popularised Ovid's lines in an avowed translation, 
and also in an original poem, 'De rimmortalite des poetes,' which gave 
the boast an exceptionally buoyant expression. Ronsard's odes and 
sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed 
with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines 
from Ronsard's Ode (livre i. No. vii.) 'Au Seigneur Carnavalet,' illus- 
trate his habitual treatment of the theme : 



C'est un travail de bon-heur 
Chanter les hommes louables, 
Et leur bastir un honneur 
Seul vainqueur des ans muables. 
Le marbre ou I'airain vestu 
D'un labeur vif par I'enelume 
N'animent tant la vertu 
Que les Muses par la plume. . . . 

(CEuvres de Ronsard, ed. Blanchemain, ii. 58, 62.) 
^ Ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62. 
^ Shakespeare Soc. p. 93. 
3 Spenser, when commemorating the death of the Earl of War- 



Les neuf divines pucelles 
Gardent ta gloire chez elles ; 
Et mon luth, qu'ell'ont fait estre 
De leurs secrets le grand prestre. 
Par cest hymne solennel 
Respandra dessus ta race 
Je ne sgay quoy de sa grace 
Qui te doit faire etemel. 



1 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblush- 
ing iteration. Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as 
'my immortal song' ('Idea/ vi. 14) and 'my world-out- 
wearing rhymes' (xliv. 7), embodied the vaunt in such 
lines as : 

While thus my pen strives to eternize thee ('Idea,' xliv. i). 
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish {ib. xliv. 11). 
My name shall mount unto eternity (ib. xliv. 14). 
All that I seek is to eternize thee (ib. xlvii. 14). 

Daniel was no less explicit : 

This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monument (Delia, xxxvii. 9). 

Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed, 

Unburied in these lines (ib. xxxix. 9-10). 

These [sc. my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect 

That fortify thy name against old age; 

And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect 

Against the dark and time's consuming rage {ib. 1. 9-12). 

Shakespeare, in his references to his 'eternal lines' 
(xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject 
of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel's exact 
phrase, his 'monument' (Ixxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely 
accommodating himself to the prevailing taste. Amid 
the oblivion of the day of doom Shakespeare foretells 
that his friend 

shall in these black lines be seen, 
And they shall live, and he in them still green. (Sonnet Ixiii. 13-14.) 
'Your monument' (the poet continues) 'shall be my gentle verse, 
Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread . . . 
You still shall live, — such virtue hath my pen. (Sonnet Ixxxi. 9-10, 13.) 

Characteristically in Sonnet Iv. Shakespeare invested 
the conventional vaunt with a splendour that was hardly 
approached by any other poet : 

wick in the Ruines of Time (c. 1591), assured the Earl's widowed 
Countess, 

Thy Lord shall never die the whiles this verse 

Shall live, and surely it shall live for ever : 

For ever it shall live, and shall rehearse 

His worthie praise, and vertues dying never, 

Though death his soul doo from his body sever ; 

And thou thyself herein shalt also live : 

Such grace the heavens doo to my verses give. 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 189 

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 

But you shall shine more bright in these contents 

Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. 

When wasteful war shall statues overturn. 

And broils root out the work of masonry, 

Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn 

The living record of your memory. 

'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity 

Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room 

Even in the eyes of all posterity 

That wear this world out to the ending doom. 

So, till the judgement that yourself arise, 

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. 

Very impressively does Shakespeare subscribe to a lead- 
ing tenet of the creed of all Renaissance poetry.^ 

The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the 
sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses to a 
woman. In two of the latter (cxxxv.-vi.), where he 
quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own name 
of Will with a lady's 'will' (the synonym in Elizabethan 

^ See also Shakespeare's Sonnets xix. liv. Ix. Ixv. and cvii. In the 
three quotations in the text Shakespeare catches very nearly Ronsard's 
notes : 

Donne moy I'encre at le papier aussi, 

En cent papiers tesmoins de mon souci 

Je veux tracer la peine que j 'endure : 

En cent papiers plus durs que diamant, 

A fin qu'un jour nostre race future 

Juge du mal que je souffre en aimant. 

{Amours, 1. cxxxiii. (Euvres, i. log.) 

Vous vivrez et croistrez comme Laure en grandeur 

Au moins tant que vivront les plumes et le livre. 

(Sonnets pour Helene, 11. ii.) 

Plus dur que fer j'ay fini mon ouvrage, 

Que Fan, dispos a demener les pas, 

Que I'eau, le vent ou le brulant orage, 

L'injuriant, ne ru'ront a has. 

Quand ce viendra que le dernier trespas 

M'assoupira d'un somme dur, a I'heure, 

Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n'ira pas, 

Restant de luy la part meilleure. . . . 

Sus donque, Muse, emporte au del la gloire 

Que j'ay gaign6e, annonjant la victoire 

Dont a bon droit je me voy jouissant. . . . 

{Odes, livre v. No. xxxii. 'A sa Muse.') 

In Sonnet Ixxii. in Amours (livre i.), Ronsard declares that his mis- 
tress's name 

Victorieux des peuples et des rois 
S'en voleroit sus I'aile de ma ryme. 



igo WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

English of both 'lust' and 'obstinacy'), he derisively 
challenges comparison with wire-drawn conceits of 
. . rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, 
sonnets ad- who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress's 
dressed to '-wills,' and had turned the word 'grace' to 

a woman. ' . r>i ^ 

the same punning account as bhakespeare 
turned the word 'will.'^ Similarly in Sonnet cxxx., 
beginning — 

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ; 
Coral is far more red than her lips' red . . . 
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head/ 

the poet satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, 
metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their 
mistresses' features. It was not the only time that 
Shakespeare deprecated the sonnetteer's practice of 
comparing features of women's beauty with 'earth and 
sea's rich gems' (xxi. 5-6) .^ 

In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare 
graciously notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes 
of his mistress, and expresses a preference for features 

^ See Appendix viii., 'The Will Sonnets,' for the interpretation of 
Shakespeare's conceit and like efforts of Barnes. 

^ Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnet- 
teers' affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel's Delia, 1591, No. xxvi., 'And 
golden hair may change to silver wire'; Lodge's Phillis, 1595, 'Made 
blush the beauties of her curled wire'; Barnes's Parthenophil, sonnet 
xlviii., 'Her hairs no grace of golden wires want.' For the habitual 
comparison of lips with coral cf. 'Coral-coloured lips' {Zepheria, 1594, 
No. xxiii.) ; 'No coral is her lip' (Lodge's Phillis, 1595, No. viii.) 'Ce 
beau coral' are the opening words of Ronsard's Amours, livre i. No. 
xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women's 
features. Remy Belleau, one of Ronsard's poetic colleagues, treated 
that comparative study most comprehensively in 'Les Amours et nou- 
veaux eschanges des pierres precieuses, vertus et proprietez d'icelles' 
which was first published at Paris in 1576. In A Lover's Complaint, 
lines 280-1, the writer betrays knowledge of such strained imagery when 
he mentions : 

deep-brained sonnets that did amplify 
Each stone's dear nature, worth and quality. 

^ Here Spenser in his Amoretti, No. ix., gives Shakespeare a very 
direct cue, as may be seen when Spenser's cited sonnet is read alongside 
of Shakespeare's sonnet xxi. 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 191 

of that hue over those of the fair hue which was, he tells 
us, more often associated in poetry with beauty. He 
commends the ' dark lady ' for refusing to prac- ^j^^ p^^j^^ 
tise those arts by which other women of the day of 'black- 
gave their hair and faces colours denied them °^^^' 
by Nature.-^ In his praise of 'blackness' or a dark 
complexion Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his 
own hnes in 'Love's Labour's Lost' (rv. iii. 241-7), 
where the heroine Rosaline is described as 'black as 
ebony,' with 'brows decked in black,' and in 'mourning' 
for her fashionable sisters' indulgence in the disguising 
arts of the toilet. ' No face is fair that is not full so black, 
exclaims RosaHne's lover. But neither in the sonnets 
nor in the play can Shakespeare's praise of 'blackness' 
claim the merit of being his own invention. The conceit 
is familiar to the French sonnetteers.^ Sir Philip Sidney, 
in Sonnet vii. of his 'Astrophel and Stella,' had antici- 
pated its employment in England. The 'beams' of the 
eyes of Sidney's mistress were 'wrapt in colour black' 
and wore 'this mourning weed,' so 

That whereas black seems beauty's contrary, 
She even in black doth make all beauties flow.' 



^ Cf. Sonnet Ixviii. 3-7. Desportes had previously protested with 
equal warmth against the artificial disguises — false hair and cosmetics 
— of ladies' toilets : 

Ceste vive couleur, qui ravit et qui blesse 
Les esprits des amans, de la feinte abusez, 

Ce n'est que blanc d'Espagne, [i.e. a cosmetic] et ces cheveux frisez 
Ne sont pas ses cheveux : c'est une fausse tresse. 

('Diverses Amours,' Sonnet xxix. in CEuvres, ed. Michiels, p. 398.) 

2Cf. 

La modeste Venus, la honteuse et las age, 
Estoit par les anciens toute peinte de noir . . . 
Noire est la Verite cachee en un nuage. 

(Amadis Jamyn, CEuvres, i. p. 129, No. xcv.) 

' Shakespeare adopted this phraseology of Sidney literally in both 
the play and the sonnet ; while Sidney's further conceit that the lady's 
eyes are in 'this mourning weed' in order 'to honour all their deaths 
who for her bleed ' is reproduced in Shakespeare's Sonnets cxxxii. — one 
of the two under consideration — where he tells his mistress that her 
eyes 'have put on black' to become 'loving mourners' of him who is 
denied her love. 



192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

To his praise of 'blackness' in Love's Labour's Lost' 
Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on 
the paradox that he detects in the conceit.^ Similarly, 
the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced 
to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which 
the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of 
feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates 
moral turpitude or blackness of heart. Twice, in much 
the same language as had already served a Hke purpose 
in the play, does he mock his 'dark lady' with this un- 
compHmentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and 
eyes. 

The two sonnets, in which this uncomplimentary view 
of 'blackness' is developed, form part of a series of twelve, 
which belongs to a special category of sonnet- 
nets of teering effort. In them Shakespeare abandons 
vitupera- ^j^g sugared sentiment which characterises most 
of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets. 
He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate 
abuse upon a woman whom he represents as disdaining 
his advances. She is as ' black as hell,' as ' dark as night,' 
and with ' so foul a face ' was ' the bay where all men ride.' 
The genuine anguish of a rejected lover often expresses 
itself in curses both loud and deep, but in Shakespeare's 
sonnets of vituperation, despite their dramatic intensity, 
there is a declamatory parade of figurative extravagance 
which suggests that the emotion is feigned. 

Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some 
point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation 
of a cruel siren. Among Shakespeare's English contem- 
poraries Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets 
with a female 'tyrant,' a 'Medusa,' a 'rock.' 'Women' 
(Barnes laments) ' are by nature proud as devils.' On the 

1 O paradox ! Black as the badge of hell, 
The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night. 

{Love's Labour's Lost, iv. iii. 254-5.) 
To look like her are chimney-sweepers black, 
And since her time are colliers counted bright. 
And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack. 
Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light {ib. 266-9). 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 1 93 

European continent the method of vituperation was long 
practised systematically. Ronsard's sonnets celebrated 
in Shakespeare's manner a 'fierce tigress,' a 'murderess,' 
a 'Medusa.' Another French sonnetteer Claude de 
Pontoux broadened the formula in a sonnet addressed 
to his mistress which opened : 

Affamee Meduse, enragee Gorgonne, 
Horrible, espouvantable, et felonne tigresse, 
Cruelle et rigoureuse, allechante et traistresse, 
Meschante abominable, et sanglante Bellonne.^ 

A third French sonnetteer, of Ronsard's school, Eti- 
enne Jodelle, designed in 1570 a collection of as many as 
three hundred vituperative sonnets which he jodeiie's 
inscribed to 'hate of a woman,' and he ap- 'Contr' ^ 
propriately entitled them 'Contr' Amours' ^°^^^- 
in distinction from 'Amours,' the term appHed to son- 
nets in the honeyed vein. Only seven of Jodeiie's 
'Contr' Amours' are extant. In one the poet forestalls 
Shakespeare's confession of remorse for having lauded 
the black hair and complexion of his mistress.^ But at 

^ De Pontoux's L'Idee (sonnet ccviii.), a sequence of 288 sonnets 
published in iS7<). 

2 No. vii. of Jodeiie's Contr' Amours runs thus : 

Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils dore 

Ces cheueux noirs dignes d'vne Meduse? 

Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m'amuse, 

Ay-ie de lis et roses colore ? 
Combien ce front de rides laboure 

Ay-ie applani ? et quel a fait ma Muse 

Le gros sourcil, ou foUe elle s'abuse, 

Ayant sur luy Fare d'Amour figure? 
Quel ay-ie fait son ceil se renfongant ? 

Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant? 

Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quelles 
Quel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps? 

Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts, 

Viuoit heureux de mes peines mortelles. 

(Jodeiie's (Euvres, isg7, pp. gi-g4.) 

With this should be compared Shakespeare's Sonnets cxxxvii. cxlviii. 
and cl. In No. vi. of his Contr' Amours Jodelle, after reproaching his 
' traitres vers ' with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, 
and concludes :' 

Ja si long temps faisant d'un Diable vn Ange 
Vous m'ouurez I'oeil en I'iniuste louange, 
Et m'aueuglez en I'iniuste tourment, 
O 



194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

all points there is complete identity of tone between 
Jodelle's and Shakespeare's vituperative efforts. 

The artificial regularity with which the sonnetteers 
of all lands sounded the vituperative stop, whenever 

they exhausted their faculty of adulation, 
Harve^^'s cxcited ridiculc in both England and France. 
'Amorous In Shakespcarc's early life the convention was 
Wet.' wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in 'An 

Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Stu- 
dent's Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall 
please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or 
earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here 
discoursed.' ^ After extolhng the beauty and virtue of 
his mistress above that of Aretino's Angelica, Petrarch's 
Laura, Catullus's Lesbia, and eight other far-famed 
objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces 
her in burlesque rhyme as 'a serpent in brood,' 'a poi- 
sonous toad,' 'a heart of marble,' and 'a stony mind 
as passionless as a block.' Finally he tells her, 

If ever there were she-devils incarnate 
They are altogether in thee incorporate. 

The 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' may 
in her main lineaments be justly ranked with the son- 
netteer's well-seasoned type of feminine ob- 
ventioT'of duracy. It is quite possible that Shakespeare 
'the dark jj^g^y havc met in real life a dark-complexioned 
^ ^' siren, and it is possible that he may have fared 

ill at her disdainful hands. But no such incident is needed 

With this should be compared Shakespeare's Sonnet cxliv., lines 9-10 : 

And whether that my angel be tum'd fiend 
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell. 

A conventional sonnet of extravagant vituperation, which Drummond 
of Hawthornden translated from Marino {Rime, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is 
introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond's collec- 
tion of 'sugared' sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv. : Drummond's Poems, 
ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217). 

1 The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey's 
Letter-book (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43). 



THE CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS 195 

to account for the presence of the ' dark lady ' in the son- 
nets. The woman acquires more distinctive features in 
the dozen sonnets scattered through the collection which 
reveal her in a treacherous act of intrigue with the poet's 
friend. At certain points in the series of sonnets she 
becomes the centre of a conflict between the competing 
calls of love and friendship. Though the part which 
is there imputed to her lies outside the sonnetteer's 
ordinary conventions, the role is a traditional one 
among heroines of Italianate romance. It cannot have 
lain beyond the scope of Shakespeare's dramatic inven- 
tion to vary his portrayal of the sonnetteer's conven- 
tional type of feminine obduracy by drawing a fresh 
romantic interest from a different branch of literature.^ 
She has been compared, not very appositely, with Shake- 
speare's splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of 
' Antony and Cleopatra.' From one point of view the 
same criticism may be passed on both. There is no 
greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare's 
personal environment the original of the 'dark lady' 
of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his 
Queen of Egypt. 

^ The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were ad- 
dressed to the 'dark lady,' and that the 'dark lady' is identifiable with 
Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are shadowy conjec- 
tures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The 
introduction of her name into the discussion is due to the mistaken 
notion that Shakespeare was the protege of Pembroke, that most of the 
sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was probably acquainted 
with his patron's mistress. See Appendix vii. The expressions in two of 
the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the disdainful mistress had 
' robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents ' (cxlii. 8) and ' in act her bed- 
vow broke' (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced 
by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that 
she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be 
general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed 
closely. 



XII 

THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 

Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shake- 
speare's sonnets there lurk suggestive references to the 

circumstances in his external Hfe that at- 
Sctln^Se tended their composition. If few can be 
'dedica- safely regarded as autobiographic revelations 
ne^. ""'^^ of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of 

the relations in which he stood to a patron, and 
to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that 
patron's Hterary retainers. Twenty sonnets, which may 
for purposes of exposition be entitled 'dedicatory' son- 
nets, are addressed to one who is declared without much 
periphrasis to be a patron of the poet's verse (Nos. 
xxiii. xxvi. xxxii. xxxvii. xxxviii. Ixix. Ixxvii.-lxxxvi. 
c. ci. ciii. cvi.) In one of these — Sonnet Ixxviii. — 
Shakespeare asserted : 

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse 
And found such fair assistance in my verse 
As every alien pen hath got my use 
And under thee their poesy disperse. 

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's 
readiness to accept the homage of other poets seemed to 
be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence 
in his patron's esteem. 

Shakespeare's biographer is under an obligation to 
attempt an identification of the persons whose relations 
with the poet are indicated so explicitly. The problem 
presented by the patron is simple. Shakespeare states 
unequivocally that he has no patron but one. 

Sing [sc. O Muse !] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem, 
And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8). 
196 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 1 97 

For to no other pass my verses tend 

Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12). 

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative 
poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare who is known 
to biographical research. No contemporary 
document or tradition gives any hint that Jf'^louth- 
Shakespeare was the friend or dependent ampton ^ 
of any other man of rank. Shakespeare's soiepatron. 
close intimacy with the Earl is attested under 
his own hand in the dedicatory epistles of his 'Venus 
and Adonis' and 'Lucrece,' which were penned respec- 
tively in 1593 and 1594. A trustworthy tradition cor- 
roborates that testimony. According to Nicholas Rowe, 
Shakespeare's first adequate biographer, 'there is one 
instance so singular in the magnificence of this patron of 
Shakespeare's that if I had not been assured that the 
story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who 
was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I 
should not have ventured to have inserted ; that my 
Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand 
pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase 
which he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great 
and very rare at any time.' 

There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of 
the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is 
distinctively greeted in • the sonnets as the 
poet's patron. Three of the twenty 'dedi- 'dedica- 
catory' sonnets merely translate into the tory' 

sonnets. 

language of poetry 'the dedicated words 
which writers use' (Ixxxii. 3), the accepted expressions 
of devotion which had already done duty in the dedica- 
tory epistle in prose that prefaces 'Lucrece.' 

That epistle, which opens with the sentence 'The love 
I dedicate to your lordship is without end,'^ is finely 
paraphrased in Sonnet xxvi. : 

^ The whole epistle is quoted on pp. 148-9 supra. For comment on 
the use of 'lover' and 'love' in Elizabethan English as synonyms for 
'friend' and 'friendship,' see p. 205 n. i. 



198 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage 

Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, 

To thee I send this written ambassage. 

To witness duty, not to show my wit : 

Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine 

May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it, 

But that I hope some good conceit of thine 

In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it 

Till whatsoever star that guides my moving, 

Points on me graciously with fair aspect. 

And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving 

To show me worthy of thy sweet respect : 

Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ; 

Till then not show my head where thou may'st prove me.i 

The 'Lucrece' epistle's intimation that the patron's 
love alone gives value to the poet's 'untutored lines' 
is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which doubtless reflected 
a moment of depression : 

If thou survive my well-contented day. 
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover, 
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey 
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover, 
Compare them with the bettering of the time. 
And though they be outstripp'd by every pen. 
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme, 
Exceeded by the height of happier men. 
O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought : 
'Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age, 
A dearer birth than this his love had brought. 
To march in ranks of better equipage ^ ; 
But since he died, and poets better prove. 
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.' 

^ There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John 
Davies in the ninth and last of his 'gulling' sonnets, in which he ridicules 
the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to any one. 

To love my lord I do knight's service owe. 

And therefore now he hath my wit in ward ; 

But while it [i.e. the poet's wit] is in his tuition so 

Methinks he doth intreat [i.e. treat] it passing hard . . . 

But why should love after minority 

(When I have passed the one and twentieth year) 

Preclude my wit of his sweet Uberty, 

And make it still the yoke of wardship bear? 

I fear he [i.e. my lord] hath another title [i.e. right to my wit] got 

And holds my wit now for an idiot. 

* Thomas Tyler assigns this sonnet to the year 1 598 or later, on the 
fallacious ground that this line was probably imitated from an expression 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 1 99 

A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in 
Sonnet xxxviii. : 

How can my Muse want subject to invent, 

While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse 

Thine own sweet argument, too excellent 

For every vulgar paper to rehearse? 

O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me 

Worthy perusal stand against thy sight ; 

For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee. 

When thou thyself dost give invention light? 

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth ^ 

Than those old nine which rhymers invocate ; 

And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth 

Eternal numbers to outlive long date. 

If my slight Muse do please these curious days, 
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise. 

The central conceit here so finely developed — that 
the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protege's 
verse because he inspires it — belongs to the most 
conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation. When 
Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled 
'Delia' to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the 
prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the con- 
cluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare. 
Daniel wrote : 

Great patroness of these my humble rhymes, 
Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . . 
O leave [i.e. cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . . 

Whereof the travail I may challenge mine. 

But yet the glory, madam, must be thine. 

Elsewhere in the sonnets we hear fainter echoes of 
the ' Lucrece ' epistle. Repeatedly does the sonnetteer re- 
new the assurance given there that his patron is 'part 

in Marston's Pigmalion's Image, published in 1598, where 'stanzas' are 
said to 'march rich bedight in warlike equipage.' The suggestion of 
plagiarism is quite gratuitous. The phrase was common in Elizabethan 
literature long before Marston employed it. Nashe, in his preface to 
Greene's Menaphon, which was published in 1589, wrote that the works 
of the poet Watson 'march in equipage of honour with any of your an- 
cient poets.' (Cf. Peele's Works, ed. Bullen, ii. 236.) 
1 Cf. Drayton's Ideas Mirrovr 1594, Amour 8. 



200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of all ' he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the sonnets 
with such expressions as these : 

[I] by a part of all your glory live (xxxvii. 1 2) ; 

Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix. 2) ; 

My spirit is thine, the better part of me (Ixxiv. 8) ; 

while 'the love without end' which Shakespeare had 
vowed to Southampton in the Hght of day reappears in 
sonnets addressed to the youth as 'eternal love' (cviii. 
9) and a devotion ' what shall have no end ' (ex. 9) . 

The identification of the rival poets whose 'richly 
compiled' 'comments' of his patron's 'praise' excited 

Shakespeare's jealousy is a more difficult in- 
in South- quiry than the identification of the patron. 
P^P*^™'^ The rival poets with their 'precious phrase by 

all the Muses filed' (Ixxxv. 4) are to be sought 
among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are 
known to have shared his patronage. The field of choice 
is not small. Southampton from boyhood cultivated 
Hterature and the society of literary men. In 1594 no 
nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation 
from the contemporary world of letters.^ Thomas Nashe 
justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his 
'Life of Jack Wilton' in 1594, as ' a dear lover and 
cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets 
themselves.' Nashe addressed to him many affection- 
ately phrased sonnets. The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe 
Barnes and the miscellaneous Hterary practitioner Ger- 
vase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, 
yearnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets 
which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare's 
with admiration for his personal charm. Similarly 
John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is to be reckoned 
among Shakespeare's literary acquaintances,^ wrote to 
Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before 

^ See Appendix iv. for a full account of Southampton's relations with 
Nashe and other men of letters. 
^ See p. 155-6, note 2. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 20I 

his 'Worlde of Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary), 
' as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sun- 
shine of your honour hath infused Hght and life.' 

Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described 
that protege of Southampton, whom he deemed a 
specially dangerous rival, as an 'able' and a 
'better' 'spirit,' 'a worthier pen,' a vessel 'of spe^are's 
tall building and of goodly pride,' compared f^arofa 
with whom he was himself 'a worthless boat.' 
He detected a touch of magic in the man's writ- 
ing. His 'spirit,' Shakespeare hyperboHcally declared, 
had been 'by spirits taught to write above a mortal 
pitch,' and 'an affable familiar ghost' nightly gulled him 
with intelligence. Shakespeare's dismay at the fascina- 
tion exerted on his patron by ' the proud full sail of his 
[rival's] great verse' sealed for a time, he declared, the 
springs of his own invention (Ixxxvi.). 

There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice 
of Shakespeare's laudation of 'the other poet's' powers. 
He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field 
who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into 
admiration by his promise rather than by his achieve- 
ment. 'Eloquence and courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Har- 
vey at the time, 'are ever bountiful in the amplifying 
vein ' ; and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, ha- 
bitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to 
see their young friends achieve, in language implying 
that they had already achieved them. All the condi- 
tions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's 
identification with the Oxford scholar Barnabe Bames^ 
Barnes, a youthful panegyrist of Southampton f^°^j.j^[f 
and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by 
contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet. His 
first collection of sonnets, ' Parthenophil and Parthe- 
nophe,' with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was 
printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of Spirit- 
ual Sonnets,' in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first 
book, which included numerous adaptations from the 



202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, 
among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and at 
least one first-rate sonnet (No. Ixvi. 'Ah, sweet con- 
tent, where is thy mild abode?'). The veteran Thomas 
Churchyard called Barnes 'Petrarch's scholar' ; the 
learned Gabriel Harvey bade him ' go forward in maturity 
as he had begun in pregnancy,' and 'be the gallant poet, 
like Spenser ' ; the fine poet Campion judged his verse 
to be 'heady and strong.' In a sonnet that Barnes 
addressed in this earliest volume to the 'virtuous' 
Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes 
were 'the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,' 
and that his sole ambition was 'by flight to rise' to a 
height worthy of his patron's 'virtues.' Shakespeare 
sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet Ixxviii. that his lord's 
eyes 

that taught the dumb on high to sing, 
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly, 
Have added feathers to the learned's wing, 
And given grace a double majesty ; 

while in the following sonnet he asserted that the 
'worthier pen' of his dreaded rival when lending his 
patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism, for he 'stole 
that word' from his patron's 'behaviour.' The emphasis 
laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from 
Southampton's 'gracious eyes' on the one hand, and his 
reiterated references to his patron's 'virtue' on the 
other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly 
alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly 
contested race for Southampton's favour. In Sonnet 
Ixxxv. Shakespeare declares that he cries '"Amen" to 
every hymn that able spirit [i.e. his rival] affords.' 
Very few poets of the day in England followed Ron- 
sard's practice of bestowing the title of hymn on mis- 
cellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies the word 
to his poems of love.^ When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet 

^ Cf. Parthenophil, Madrigal i. line 12; Sonnet xvii. line 9. The 
French usage of applying the term 'hymne' to secular lyrics was un- 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 203 

Ixxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the rela- 
tions of himself and his rival with his patron — 

My saucy bark, inferior far to his . . . 

Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat, — 

he seems to write with ah eye on Barnes's identical choice 
of metaphor 

My fancy's ship tossed here and there by these [sc. sorrow's floods] 

Still floats in danger ranging to and fro. 

How fears my thoughts' swift pinnace thine hard rock ! ^ 

Gervase Markham, an industrious man of letters, is 
equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the 
potent influence of his patron's 'eyes,' which, ^, 

t i^i ^ • ^ • J Other theo- 

he says, crown the most victorious pen — a ries as to 
possible reference to Shakespeare. Nashe's j^^^-Y^^'^ 
poetic praises of the Earl are no less enthusi- 
astic, and are of a finer literar^ temper than Markham's. 
But Shakespeare's description of his rival's literary work 
fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nashe 
than the verse of their fellow aspirant Barnes. 

Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival's 
genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shake- 
speare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be 
evoked by the work of George Chapman, the dramatist 
and classical translator, than by that of any other con- 
temporary poet. But Chapman produced no con- 
spicuously 'great verse' till he began his rendering of 
Homer in 1598; and although he appended in 16 10 
to a complete edition of his translation a sonnet to 
Southampton, it was couched in cold terms of formality, 
and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each ad- 
dressed to a distinguished nobleman with whom the 
writer implies that he had previously no close relations.^ 

common in England, although Chapman styles each section of his 
poem 'Shadow of the Night' (1594) 'a hymn' and Michael Drayton 
contributed 'hymns' to his Harmonie of the Church (1591). 

1 Parthenophil, Sonnet xci. 

^ Much irrelevance has been introduced into the discussion of Chap- 



204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The poet Drayton, and the dramatists Ben Jonson and 
Marston, have also been identified by various critics 
with ' the rival poet,' but none of these shared Southamp- 
ton's bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare 
applies to his rival's verse specially applicable to the 
productions of any of them. 

man's claim to be the rival poet. Prof. Minto in his Characteristics of 
English Poets, p. 291, argued that Chapman was the man mainly be- 
cause Shakespeare declared his competitor to be taught to write by 
'spirits' — 'his compeers by night' — • as well as by 'an affable familiar 
ghost' which gulled him with intelligence at night (Ixxxvi. 5 seq.). Pro- 
fessor Minto saw in these phrases allusions to some lines by Chapman in 
his Shadows of Night (1594), a poem on Night. There Chapman warned 
authors in one passage that the spirit of literature will often withhold 
itself from them unless it have 'drops of their blood like a heavenly 
familiar,' and in another place sportively invited 'nimble and aspiring 
wits' to join him in consecrating their endeavours to 'sacred night.' 
There is no connection between Shakespeare's theory of the supernatural 
and nocturnal sources of his rival's influence and Chapman's trite allu- 
sion to the current faith in the power of 'nightly familiars' over men's 
minds and lives, or Chapman's invitation to his literary comrades to 
honour Night with him. Nashe in his prose tract called independently 
The Terrors of the Night, which was also printed in 1594, described the 
nocturnal habits of 'familiars' more expHcitly than Chapman. The 
publisher Thomas Thorpe, in dedicating in 1600 Marlowe's translation 
of Lucan (bk. i.) to his friend Edward Blount, humorously referred to 
the same topic when he reminded Blount that 'this spirit [i.e. Marlowe], 
whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the Churchyard [of St. Paul's] 
in at the least three or four sheets . . . was sometime a familiar of 
your own.' On the strength of these quotations, and accepting Professor 
Minto's line of argument, Nashe, Thorpe, or Blount, whose 'familiar' is 
declared to have been no less a personage than Marlowe, has as good a 
claim as Chapman to be the rival poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. A 
second argument in Chapman's favour has been suggested. Chapman 
in the preface to his translation of the Iliads (1611) denounces without 
mentioning any name 'a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and 
down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and 
buzzing into every ear my detraction.' It is suggested that Chapman 
here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in 
the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the 
rival, should have termed those high compliments 'detraction.' There 
is small ground for identifying Chapman's 'windsucker' with Shake- 
speare (cf. Wyndham, p. 255). Mr. Arthur Acheson in Shakespeare 
and the Rival Poet (1903) adopts Prof. Minto's theory of Chapman's 
identity with the rival poet, arguing on fantastic grounds that Shake- 
speare and Chapman were at lifelong feud, and that Shakespeare not 
only attacked his adversary in the sonnets but held him up to ridicule 
as Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost and as Thersites in Troilus and 
Cressida. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 205 

Many besides the 'dedicatory' sonnets are addressed 
to a handsome youth of wealth and rank, for whom the 
poet avows 'love,' in the Elizabethan sense of jj ^j^^ 
friendship.^ Although no specific reference is Sonnets of 
made outside the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets "^'^'^^^p- 
to the youth as a literary patron, and the clues to his 
identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for 
the inference that the greater number of the sonnets 
of devoted 'love' also have Southampton for their 
subject. 

Classical study is mainly responsible in the era of 
the Renaissance for the exalted conception of friendship 
which placed it in the world of literature on 
the level of love. The elevated estimate traditions 
was largely bred in Renaissance poetry of the j{ , , . 
traditions attaching to such twin heroes of 
antiquity as Pylades and Orestes, Theseus and Pirithous, 
Laelius and Scipio. To this classical catalogue Boc- 
caccio, ampHfying the classical legend, added in the 
fourteenth century the new examples of Palamon and 
Arcite and of Tito and Gesippo, and the latter pair of 
heroic friends fully shared in Shakespeare's epoch the 
literary vogue of their forerunners. It was to well- 
seasoned classical influence that poetry of the sixteenth 
century owed the tendency to identify the ideals of 
friendship and love.^ At the same time it is important 

^ 'Lover' and 'friend' were interchangeable terms in Elizabethan 
English. Cf. p. 197 note. Brutus opens his address to the citizens of 
Rome with the words, 'Romans, countrymen, and lovers,' and subse- 
quently describes Julius Cssar as 'my best lover' (Julius Ccesar, iii. 
ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her 
husband Bassanio, calls him 'the bosom lover of my lord' {Merchant of 
Venice, iii. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly de- 
scribed himself as his correspondent's 'ever true lover'; and Drayton, 
writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that 
an admirer of his literary work was ' in love ' with him. The word ' love ' 
was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author 
and his patron. Nashe, when dedicating Jack Wilton in 1594 to South- 
ampton, calls him ' a dear lover ... of the lovers of poets as of the poets 
themselves.' 

2 Records of friendship in Elizabethan literature invariably acknow- 



2o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

to recognise that in Elizabethan as in all Renaissance 
literature — more especially in sonnets — the word 
'love' together with all the common terms of endear- 
ment was freely employed in a conventional or figura- 
tive fashion, which deprives the expressions of much 
of the emotional force attaching to them in ordinary 
speech. 

That the whole language of love was applied by Eliza- 
bethan poets to their more or less professional inter- 
course with those who appreciated and en- pj ^jative 
couraged their literary activities is convinc- language 
ingly illustrated by the mass of verse which °^'°^^- 
was addressed to the greatest of all patrons of Ehza- 

ledged the classical debt. Edmund Spenser when describing the perfect 
quality of friendship, cites as his witnesses : 

great Hercules, and Hyllus dear; 
True Jonathan, and David trusty tried ; 
Stout Theseus, and Pirithous his fear ; 
Pylades and Orestes by his side ; 
Mild Titus, and Gesippus without pride ; 
Damon and Pythias, whom death could not sever. 

{Faerie Queene, Bk. iv. Canto x. st. 27.) 

Lyly, in his romance of Euphues, makes his hero Euphues address his 
friend Philautus thus (ed. Arber, p. 49) : 

'Assure yourself that Damon to his Pythias, Pilades to his Orestes, Tytus to his 
Gysippus, Thesius to his Pirothus, Scipio to his Laelius, was never founde more faithful!, 
then Euphues will bee to Philautus.' 

The story of Damon and Pythias formed the subject of a popular Eliza- 
bethan tragicomedy by Richard Edwardes (1570). Shakespeare pays a 
tribute to the current vogue of this classical legend when he makes 
Hamlet call his devoted friend Horatio 'O Damon dear' (Hamlet, iii. 
ii. 284). Cicero's treatise De AmicUia which was inspired by the ideal 
relations subsisting between Scipio and Laslius was very familiar to 
Elizabethan men of letters in both the Latin original and English transla- 
tions, and that volume helped to keep alive the classical example. Mon- 
taigne echoed the classical strain in his essay 'On Friendship' which 
finely describes his affection for Etienne de la Boetie and their perfect 
community of spirit. It may be worth noticing that Bacon, while in 
his essay 'On Friendship' he pays a fine tribute to the sentiment, takes 
an unamiable view of it in a second essay 'On Followers and Friends,' 
where he scornfully treats friends as merely interested and self-seeking 
dependents and frankly disparages the noble classical conception. The 
concluding words of Bacon's second essay are significant : 

'There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which wa> 
wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may 
comprehend the one the other.' 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 207 

bethan poetry — the Queen. The poets who sought 
her favour not merely commended the beauty of her 
mind and body with the semblance of amorous ecstasy ; 
they carried their protestations of 'love' to the ex- 
treme limits of realism ; they seasoned their notes 
of adoration with reproaches of inconstancy and in- 
fidelity, which they clothed in pecuHarly intimate 
phraseology. Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, 
Richard Barnfield, and Sir John Davies were among 
many of Shakespeare's contemporaries who wrote of 
their sovereign with a warmth that would mislead any 
reader who ignores the current conventions of the 
amorous vocabulary.^ 

^ Here are some of the lines in which openser angled for Queen Eliza- 
beth's professional protection ('Colin Clouts come home againe,' c. 

1594) : 

To her my thoughts I daily dedicate, 

To her my heart I nightly martyrize ; 

To her my love I lowly do prostrate, 

To her my life I wholly sacrifice : 

My thought, my heart, my love^ my life is she. 

Sir Walter Raleigh similarly celebrated his devotion to the Queen in a 
poem called ' Cynthia ' of which only a fragment survives. The tone of 
such portion as is extant is that of unrestrainable passion. At one point 
the poet reflects how 

that the eyes of my mind held her beams 
In every part transferred by love's swift thought : 

Far off or near, in waking or in dreams, 
Imagination strong their lustre brought. 

Such force her angelic appearance had 
To master distance, time or cruelty. 

The passionate illusion could hardly be produced with more vivid 
effect than in a succeeding stanza from the pen of Raleigh in the capacity 
of literary suitor : 

The thoughts of past times, like flames of hell, 
Kindled afresh within my memory 

The many dear achievements that befell 
In those prime years and infancy of love. 

See 'Cynthia,' a fragment in Poems of Raleigh, ed. Hannah, p. 38. 
Richard Barnfield in his like-named poem of Cynthia, 1595, and Fulke 
Greville in sonnets addressed to Cynthia, also extravagantly described 
the Queen's beauty and graces. In 1599 Sir John Davies, poet and 
lawyer, apostrophised Elizabeth, who was then sixty-six years old, thus : 



2o8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

It was in the rhapsodical accents of Spenser and 
Raleigh that Elizabethan poets habitually sought, not 
Gabriel ^he Queen's countenance only, but that of her 
Harvey courtiers. Great lords and great ladies alike 
Sir Philip Were repeatedly assured by poetic clients of the 
Sidney. infatuation which came of their mental and 
physical charms. The fashionable tendency to clothe 
love and friendship in the same literary garb eliminated 
all distinction between the phrases of affection which 
were addressed to patrons and those which were ad- 
dressed to patronesses. Nashe, a typical Elizabethan, 
bore graphic witness to the poetic practice when he in 
1595 described how Gabriel Harvey, who religiously 
observed the professional ritual, 'courted' his patron 
Sir PhiHp Sidney with every extravagance of amorous 
language.^ 

Fair soul, since to the fairest body knit 

You give such lively life, such quickening power, 

Such sweet celestial influences to it 

As keeps it still in youth's immortal flower . . . 

O many, many years may you remain 

A happy angel to this happy land. 

{Nosce Teipsum, dedication.) 

Davies published in the same year twenty-six 'Hymnes of Astrea' on 
Elizabeth's beauty and graces; each poem forms an acrostic on the 
words 'Elizabetha Regina,' and the language of love is simulated on 
almost every page. 

^ Nashe wrote of Harvey : ' I have perused vearses of his, written 
vnder his owne hand to Sir Philip Sidney, wherein he courted him as he 
were another Cyparissus or Ganimede : the last Gordian true loues knot 
or knitting up of them is this : 

Sum iecur, ex quo te primum, Sydneie, vidi ; 
Os oculosque regit, cogit amare iecur. 

'All liver am I, Sidney, since I saw thee ; 

My mouth, eyes, rule it and to loue doth draw mee.' 

Have with you to Saffron Walden in Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, iii. 
92. Cf. Shakespeare's comment on a love sonnet in Love's Labour's Lost 
(iv. iii. 74 seq.) : 

This is the liver vein, which makes flesh a deity, 

A green goose a goddess ; pure, pure idolatry. 

God amend us, God amend ! we are much out of the way. 

Throughout Europe sonnets or poems addressed to patronesses display 
identical characteristics with those that were addressed to patrons. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 209 

The tide of adulation of patrons and patronesses alike, 
in (what Shakespeare himself called) 'the liver vein,' 
long flowed without check. Until comparatively late 
in the seventeenth century there was ample justifica- 
tion for Sir Philip Sidney's warning of the flattery that 
awaited those who patronised poets and poetry : ' Thus 
doing, you shall be [hailed as] most fair, most rich, most 
wise, most all ; thus doing, you shall dwell upon super- 
latives ; thus doing, your soul shall be placed with 
Dante's Beatrice.' ^ There can be little doubt that 

Shakespeare, always susceptible to the contemporary 

f 

One series of Michael Angelo's impassioned sonnets was addressed to a 
young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble 
patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in both, and in- 
ternal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two 
series. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble 
patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are often amorous 
in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare's sonnets of 
friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem The Pilgrimage to Paradise 
coyned with the Countess of Pembroke's Love, 1592, and another work of 
his, The Countess of Pembroke's Passion (first printed from manuscript 
in 1867), pays the countess, his literary patroness, a homage which is 
indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and over- 
mastering passion. Patronesses as well as patrons are addressed in the 
same adulatory terms in the long series of sonnets before Spenser's 
Faerie Queene, at the end of Chapman's Iliad, and at the end of John 
Davies's Microcosmos, 1603. Other addresses to patrons and patronesses 
are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jon- 
son's Forest and Underwoods and Donne's Poems. Sonnets to men are 
occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences in honour of women. 
Sonnet xi. in Drayton's sonnet-fiction called 'Idea' (in 1599 edition) 
seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare 
often addressed his hero; and a few others of Drayton's sonnets are 
ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Soothern's eccentric col- 
lection of love-sonnets. Pandora (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the 
Earl of Oxford; and William Smith in his Chloris (1596) (a sonnet-fiction 
of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of 
the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund 
Spenser. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a 
long sequence of sonnets addressed to a man who does not prove on in- 
vestigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barn- 
field appended to his poem Cynthia a set of twenty sonnets, in which he 
feignedly avowed affection for a youth called Ganymede. Barnfield 
explained that he was fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second 
of Virgil's Eclogues, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the 
shepherd-boy Alexis. 

^ Apologie for Poetrie (1595), ed. Shuckburgh, p. 62. 



2IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

vogue, penned many sonnets in that ' liver vein ' which 
was especially calculated to flatter the ear of a praise- 
loving Maecenas like the Earl of Southampton. It is 
quite possible that beneath all the conventional adula- 
tion there lay a genuine affection. But the perfect 
illusion of passion which often colours Shakespeare's 
poetic vows of friendship may well be fruit of his 
interpretation of the common usage in the glow of 
dramatic instinct. 

Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never 

grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and 

chivalry in mediaeval romance lived again in 

speare's him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, 

assurances g^j^^j ^j^^^ j^jg affcction was Unalterable. Writ- 

01 affection. . . , . 

mg Without concealment m their own names, 
many other poetic clients gave their Maecenases the 
like assurances, crediting them with every perfection of 
mind and body, and 'placing' them, in Sidney's phrase, 
'with Dante's Beatrice.' Matthew Roydon wrote of 
his patron. Sir Philip Sidney : 

His personage seemed most divine, 
A thousand graces one might count 
Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. 
To heare him speak and sweetly smUe 
You were in Paradise the while. 

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron. Ad- 
miral Lord Charles Howard, that 'his good personage 
and noble deeds' made him the pattern to the present 
age of the old heroes of whom 'the antique poets' were 
'wont so much to sing.' This compliment, which 
Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi.,^ 
recurs with especial frequency in contemporary sonnets 
of adulation. Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of 
Desmond as 'my best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord 

^ Cf. Sonnet lix. : 

Show me your image in some antique book . . . 

Oh sure I am the wits of former days 

To subjects worse have given admiring praise. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 21 1 

Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's undistinguished heir, 
that although his muse sought to express his love, 'the 
admired virtues' of the patron's youth 

Bred, such despairing to his daunted Muse 
That it could scarcely utter naked truth.^ 

Yet it is in foreign poetry which just proceded Shake- 
speare's era that the English dramatist's plaintive and 
yearning language is most closely adumbrated, r^^^gg^ ^^^^j 
The greatest Italian poet of the era, Tasso, the Duke 
not merely recorded in numerous s|)nnets his 
amorous devotion for his first patron, the Duke of 
Ferrara, but he also carefully described in prose the 
sentiments which, with a view to retaining the ducal 
favour, he sedulously cultivated and poetised. In a 
long prose letter to a later friend and patron, the Duke 
of Urbino, he wrote of his attitude of mind to his first 
patron thus : ^ ' I confided in him, not as we hope in 
men, but as we trust in God. ... It appeared tome, 
so long as I was under his protection, fortune and death 
had no power over me. Burning thus with devotion to 
my lord, as much as man ever did with love to his mis- 
tress, I became, without perceiving it, almost an idolater. 
I continued in Rome and Ferrara many days and months 
in the same attachment and faith.' With illuminating 
frankness Tasso added : 'I went so far with a thousand 
acts of observance, respect, affection, and almost adora- 
tion, that at last, as they say the courser grows slow by 
too much spurring, so his [i.e. the patron's] goodwill 
towards me slackened, because I sought it too ardently.' 

There is practical identity between the alternations 
of feeling which find touching voice in many of the son- 
nets of Shakespeare and those which colour Tasso's 

^ Campion's Poems, ed. Bullen, pp. 148 seq. Cf. Shakespeare's 
Sonnets : 

how I faint when I of you do write (Ixxx. i). 
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise (Ixxxii. 6). 

See also Donne's Poems (in Muses' Library), ii. 34. 
^ Tasso, Opere, Pisa, 1821-32, vol. xiii. p. 298. 



212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

picture of his intercourse with his Duke of Ferrara. 
Italian and EngHsh poets profess for a man a loverHke 
'idolatry/ although Shakespeare conventionally warns 
his ' lord ' : * Let not my love be called idolatry ' (Sonnet 
cv.). Both writers attest the hopes and fears which his 
favour evokes in them, with a fervour and intensity of 
emotion which it was only in the power of great poets 
to feign. 

An even closer parallel in both sentiment and phrase- 
ology with Shakespeare's sonnets of friendship is furnished 
Todeiie's ^^ ^^^ sonnets of the French poet Etienne 
sonnets to JodcUe, whosc high reputation as the inventor 

s patron. ^£ French classical drama did not obscure his 
fame as a lyrist. Jodelle was well known in both capa- 
cities to cultivated Elizabethans. The suspicions of 
atheism under which he laboured, and his premature 
death in distressing poverty at the early age of forty- 
one, led English observers of the day to Hken him to 
'our tragical poet Marlowe.' ^ To a noble patron, 
Comte de Fauquemberge et de Courtenay, Jodelle 
addressed a series of eight sonnets which anticipate 
Shakespeare's sonnets at every turn.^ In the opening 
address to the nobleman Jodelle speaks of his desolation 
in his patron's absence which no crowded company 
can alleviate. Yet when his friend is absent, the French 
poet yearningly fancies him present — 

Present, absent, je pais Fame a toy toute deue. 

So Shakespeare wrote to his hero : 

Thyself away art present still with me ; 

For thou not further than my thoughts can move (xlvii. lo-ii). 

^ The parallel between the careers of Marlowe and Jodelle first ap- 
peared in Thomas Beard's Theatre of God's Judgements, 1597, and was 
repeated by Francis Meres next year in his Palladis Tamia (cf. French 
Renaissance in England, 430-1). 

^ These were first published with a long collection of 'amours' chiefly 
in sonnet form, in 1574. Cf. Jodelle, (Euvres, 1870, ed. ii. p. 174. 
Throughout these sonnets Jodelle addresses his lord in the second per- 
son singular, as Shakespeare does in all but thirty-four of his sonnets. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 213 

Jodelle credits his patron with a genius which puts 
labour and art to shame, with rank, virtue, wealth, with 
intellectual grace, and finally with 

Une bonte qui point ne change ou s'epouvante. 

Similarly Shakespeare commemorates his patron's 
'birth or wealth or wit' (xxxvii. 5) as well as his 'bounty' 
(liii, 11) and his 'abundance' (xxxvii. 11). None the 
less the French poet, echoing the classical note, avers 
that the greatest joy in the Count's life is the com- 
pleteness of the sympathy between the patron and his 
poetic admirer, which guarantees them both immortal- 
ity. Hotly does the French sonnetteer protest the 
eternal constancy of his affection. His spirit droops 
when the noble lord leaves him to go hunting or shooting, 
and he then finds his only solace in writing sonnets in 
the truant's honour. Shakespeare in his sonnets, it 
will be remembered, did no less : 

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour 
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, 
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour 
When you have bid your servant once adieu. 

(Ivii. S-8.) 

O absence ! what a torment wouldst thou prove, 
Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave 
To entertain the time with thoughts of love. 

(xxxix. 9-11.)'- 

Elsewhere Jodelle declares that he, a servant {serf, 
serviteur), has passed into the relation of a beloved and 
loving friend. The master's high birth, wealth, and 
intellectual endowments, interpose no bar to the force 
of the friendship. The great friends of classical antiq- 
uity, Pylades and Orestes, Scipio and Laelius, and the 

^ Cf . also : . 

Being your slave, what should I do but tend 
Upon the hours and times of your desire ? 

(Sonnet Ivii. 1-2.) 

That god forbid that made me first your slave, 
I should in thought control your times of pleasure. 

(Sonnet Iviii. 1-2.) 



214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

rest, lived with one another on such terms of perfect 
equality. While Jodelle wrote of his patron 

Et si Ion dit que trop par ces vers je me vante, 
C'est qu'estant tien je veux te vanter en mes heurs, 

Shakespeare greeted his ' lord of love ' with the assurance 

'Tis thee, myself, — that for myself I praise. 

(Sonnet Ixii. 13.) 

Finally Jodelle confesses to Shakespeare's experience of 
suffering, and grieves, Hke the English sonnetteer, that 
he was the victim of slander. Although Shakespeare's 
poetic note of pathos is beyond Jodelle's range, yet the 
phase of sentiment which shapes these French greetings 
of a patron in sonnet form is rarely distinguishable from 
that of Shakespeare's sonnetteering triumph. 

Some dozen poems which are dispersed through Shake- 
speare's collection at irregular intervals detach them- 
III The selves in point of theme from the rest. These 
sonnets of pieccs combine to present the poet and the 
intrigue. youth in relations which are not easy at a 
first glance to reconcile with an author's idealised wor- 
ship of a patron. The poet's friend, we are here told, 
yielded to the seductions of the poet's mistress. The 
woman is bitterly denounced for her treachery, the 
youth is complacently pardoned amid regretful rebukes. 
The poet professes to be torn asunder by his double 
affection for friend and mistress, and he lays the blame 
for the crisis on the woman's malign temperament.^ 

Two loves I have of comfort and despair 

Which like two spirits do suggest {i.e. tempt) me still : 

The better angel is a man right fair, 

The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. (Sonnet cxliv.) 

^ The dozen sonnets faU into two groups. Six of them — xxxiii.-v., 
Ixix. and xcv.-vi. — reproach the youth in a general way with sensual 
excesses, and the other six — xl.-xlii. cxxxii.-iii. and cxliv. — specifically 
point to the poet's traitorous mistress as the wilful cause of the youth's 
'fault.' 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 21 5 

The traitress is 'the dark lady' of the Sonnets of con- 
ventional vituperation. Whether the misguided youth 
of the intrigue is to be identified with the patron-friend 
of the other sonnets of friendship may be an open ques- 
tion. It might be in keeping with Southampton's 
sportive temperament for him to accept the attentions 
of a Circe, by whose fascination his poet was lured. The 
sonnetteer's sorrowful condonation of the young man's 
offence may be an illustration, drawn from life, of the 
strain which a self-willed patron under the spell of the 
ethical irregularities of the Renaissance laid on the for- 
bearance of a poetic protege. 

But while we admit that some strenuous touches in 
Shakespeare's presentation of the episode may well owe 
suggestion either to autobiographic experience 
or to personal observation, we must bear in met of 
mind that the intrigue of the 'Sonnets' in its 1*^.'^^^'V4 

, . ^ , r -n. • fnendship. 

mam phase is a commonplace of Renaissance 
romance, and that Shakespeare may after his wont be 
playing a variation on an accepted Hterary theme with 
the slenderest prompting apart from' his sense of literary 
or dramatic effect. Italian poets and noveHsts from the 
fourteenth century onwards habitually brought friend- 
ship and love into rivalry or conflict.^ The call of friend- 
ship often demanded the sacrifice of love. The laws of 
'sovereign amity,' were so fantastically interpreted as 
frequently to require a lover, at whatever cost of emo- 
tional suffering, to abandon to his friend the woman 
who excited their joint adoration. 

The Italian novelist Boccaccio offered the era of the 
Renaissance two alternative solutions of this puzzling 
problem and both long enjoyed authority in the liter- 

^ Cf. Petrarch's sonnet ccxxvii. 

' Carita di signore, amor di donna 
Son le catene, ove con multi affanni 
Legato son, perch'io stesso mi strinsi.' 

So Beza's Poemata, 1548, Epigrammata, xc. : 'De sua in Candidam at 
Audebertum benevolentia.' 



2l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ary world. In his narrative poem of 'Teseide,' Boc- 
caccio pictured the two devoted friends Palamon and 
. , Arcite as aHenated by their common love for 
treatment ^ the fair Emilia. Their rival claims to the lady's 
theme hand are decided by a duel in which Palamon 
is vanquished although he is not mortally 
wounded. But just after his victory Arcite is fatally 
Palamon injured by a fall from his horse. In his dying 
and Arcite. momcnts he bcstows EmiHa's hand on his 
friend. This is the fable which Chaucer retold in his 
'Knight's Tale,' and Shakespeare and Fletcher, accept- 
ing the cue of an earlier Elizabethan dramatist, com- 
bined to dramatise it in 'The Two Noble Kinsmen.'^ 
But Boccaccio also devised an even more famous pre- 
scription for the disorder of friends caught in the same 
toils of love. In the 'Decameron' (Day x., Novel 8) 
Gesippo, whose friendship with Tito has the classical 
perfection, is affianced to the lady Sophronia. But 
Tito and Gesippo soon discovered that his friend is like- 
Gesippo. -^igg enslaved by the lady's beauty. There- 
upon Gesippo, in the contemporary spirit of quixotic 
chivalry, contrives that Tito shall, by a trick which the 
lady does not suspect, take his place at the marriage 
and become her husband.^ In the sequel Gesippo is 
justly punished with a long series of abject misfortunes 
for his self-denying wiles. But Tito, whose friendship 
is immutable, finally restores Gesippo's fortunes and 
gives him his sister in marriage.^ The chequered ad- 

^ The perfect identity which is inherent in friendship of the Renais- 
sance type finds emphatic expression in this play. Palamon assures 
Arcite : 

We are an endless mine to one another ; 

We're one another's wife, ever begetting 

New births of love ; we're father, friends, acquaintance; 

We are, in one another, families ; 

I am your heir, and you are mine. (ii. ii. 7Q-83.) 

2 Into two plays, All's Well and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, 
true to the traditions of the Renaissance, introduces the like deception, — < 
on the part of Helena in the former piece and on that of Mariana in the 
latter. 

* The first outline of this story is found in a miscellany of the twelfth 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 217 

ventures of these devoted friends of Italy caught the 
literary sentiment of Tudor England, and enjoyed a 
wide vogue there in Shakespeare's youth.^ 

Shakespeare's contemporary, John Lyly, in his popular 
romance of 'Euphues,' treated the theme of friendship 
in competition with love on Boccaccio's lines 
although with important variations. Lyly's Euphues 
hero, Euphues, forms a rapturous friendship, |?4, 
which the author likens to that of Tito and 
Gesippo, with a young man called Philautus. The 
latter courts the fair but fickle Lucetta, and he is soon 
supplanted in her good graces by his 'shadow' Euphues. 
Less amiable than Boccaccio's Gesippo, Lyly's Philau- 
tus denounces, with all the fervour of Shakespeare's 
vituperative sonnets, both man and woman. But 
Lucetta soon transfers her attentions to a new suitor, 

century, De Clericali disciplina by Petrus Alfonsus, and thence found 
its way into the Gesta Romanorum (No. 171), the most popular story 
book of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio's tale enjoyed much vogue in a 
Latin version in the fifteenth century by Fihppo Beroaldo. This was 
rendered back into Italian by Bandello in 1509 and was turned into 
French verse by Frangois Habert in 1551. Early in the seventeenth 
century the French dramatist Alexandre Hardy dramatised the story as 
Gesippe on les deux Amis. 

'■ Sir Thomas Elyot worked a long rendering of Boccaccio's story into 
his formal treatise on the culture of Tudor youth which he called The 
Governour (1531), see Croft's edition, ii. 132 seq., while two English 
poetasters contributed independent poetic versions to early Tudor litera- 
ture. The later of these, which was issued in 1562, is entitled The most 
wonderful and pleasaunt History of Titus and Gisippus, whereby is fully 
declared the figure of perfect frendshyp, drawen into English metre. By 
Edward Lewicke, 1562. Robert Greene frequently cites the tale of Tito 
and Gesippo as an example of perfect friendship (cf . Works, ed. Grosart, 
iv. 211, vii. 243), and the story is the theme of the popular Elizabethan 
ballad 'Alphonso and Ganselo' (Sievers, Thomas Deloney, Berlin, 1904, 
pp. 83 seq.). Twice was the tale dramatised in the infancy of Tudor 
drama, once in Latin by a good scholar and schoolmaster Ralph Rad- 
clifife in the reign of Edward VI, and again in English about 1576 by an 
anonymous pen. Queen Elizabeth directed the English play — The 
Historic of Titus and Gisippus — to be acted before her on the night of 
Shrove Tuesday, February 19, 1576-7. Neither the Latin nor the Eng- 
lish play survives. Two plays by Richard Edwards (d. 1566) on like 
themes of friendship — Damon and Pythias and Palemon and Arcite — 
were acted before the Queen, in 1564 and 1566 respectively. Only 
Damon and Pythias is extant. 



2l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Curio, and Euphues and Philautus renew their in- 
terrupted ties of mutual devotion in their former 
strength. Lyly's Philautus, his Euphues, and his 
Lucetta, are, before the advent of Curio, in the precise 
situation with which Shakespeare's sonnet-intrigue 
credits the poet, the friend, and the lady. 

Yet another phase of the competing calls of love and 
friendship is portrayed by the French poet, Clement 
Clement Marot. He personally claims the experience 
Marot's which Shakcspcarc in his intrigue assigns to 
testimony, y^ fngnd. Marot relates how he was soHcited 
in love by his comrade's mistress, and in a poetic ad- 
dress, 'A celle qui souhaita Marot aussi amoureux 
d'elle qu'un sien Amy' warns her of the crime against 
friendship to which she prompts him. Less complacent 
than Shakespeare's 'friend,' Marot rejects the Siren's 
invitation on the ground that he has only half a heart 
to offer her, the other half being absorbed by friendship.^ 

Before the sonnets were penned, Shakespeare himself 
too, in the youthful comedy 'The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona,' treated friendship's struggle with 
of the ' love in the exotic light which the Renaissance 
tkmei?'^'^' sanctioned. In 'The Two Gentlemen,' when 
Valentine learns of his friend Proteus' infatua- 
tion for his own lady-love Silvia, he, like Gesippo in 
Boccaccio's tale, resigns the girl to his supplanter, 
Valentine's unworthy surrender is frustrated by the 
potent appeal of Proteus' own forsaken mistress Julia. 
But the episode shows that the issue at stake in the 
sonnets' tale of intrigue already fell within Shakespeare's 
•dramatic scrutiny. 

Shakespeare would have been conforming to his 
wonted dramatic practice had he adapted his tale of 
intrigue in the ' Sonnets ' from the stock theme of con- 
temporary romance. Yet a piece of external evidence 

^ Marot's (Euvres, 1565, p. 437. On Marot's verse loans were freely 
levied by Edmund Spenser and other Elizabethan poets. See French 
Renaissance in England, 109 seq. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 219 

suggests that in some degree fact mingled with fiction, 
truth with make-believe, earnestness with jest 
in Shakespeare's poetic presentation of the hood of a" 
clash between friendship and love,^ and that personal 
while the poet knew something at first hand of 
the disloyalty of mistress and friend, he recovered his 
composure as quickly and completely as did External 
Lyly's romantic hero Philautus under a like evidence. 
trial. A literary comrade obtained a license on Sep- 
tember 3, 1594, for the publication of a poem 'wiiiobie 
called ' Willobie his Avisa, or the True Picture ^^ Avisa.' 
of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.' ^ 
In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy- two 
cantos in varying numbers of six-Hne stanzas, the chaste 
heroine, Avisa, holds converse — in the opening section 
as a maid, and in the later section as a wife — with a 
series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly 
repulses their advances. Midway through the book its 
alleged author — Henry Willobie — is introduced in his 
own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty- 
nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa's obduracy. 
To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose 

^ The closest parallel to the Shakespearean situation (see esp. Sonnet 
xlii.) is that seriously reported by the seventeenth-century French writer, 
Saint Evremond, who complaining of a close friend's relations with his 
mistress (apparently la Comtesse d'Olonne), wrote thus to her in 1654 
of his twofold affection for her and for his comrade : ' Apprenez-moi 
contre qui je me dois facher d'avantage, ou contre lui qui m'enleve une 
maitresse, ou contre vous, qui me volez un ami. . . . J'ai trop de pas- 
sion pour donner rien au ressentiment ; ma tendresse I'importera tou- 
jours sur vos outrages. J'aime la perfide [i.e. the mistress], j'aime 
I'infidele [i.e. the friend].' {CEuvres Mtlees de Saint Evremond, ed. 
Giraud, 1865, iii. 5.) 

^ The edition of 1594 was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his Occasional 
Issues, 1880, and in 1904 by Mr. Charles Hughes, who brings new argu- 
ments to justify association of the book with Shakespeare's biography. 
Extracts from the poem appear in the New Shakspere Society's ^//w^^om 
Books, i. 169 seq. In Mistress D'Avenant the dark lady of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets (1913), Mr. Arthur Acheson again reprints Willobie his Avisa 
by way of supporting a fanciful theory which would make the 'dark 
lady' of the sonnets the heroine of that poem, and would identify her 
with the wife of the Oxford innkeeper who was mother of Sir William 
D'Avenant (see p. 449). 



220 ■ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

(canto xliv.). It is there stated that Willobie, 'being 
suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical 
wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret 
grief. At length, not able any longer to endure the 
burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth 
the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., 
who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion 
and was now newly recovered of the like infection. Yet 
[W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same vein, 
took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead 
of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the 
sharp razor of willing conceit,' encouraging Willobie to 
believe that Avisa would ultimately yield 'with pains, 
diligence, and some cost in time.' 'The miserable com- 
forter' [W. S.], the narrative continues, was moved to 
comfort his friend 'with an impossibility,' for one of two 
reasons. Either he 'now would secretly laugh at his 
friend's folly' because he 'had given occasion not long 
before unto others to laugh at his own.' Or 'he would 
see whether another could play his part better than 
himself, and, in viewing after the course of this loving 
comedy,' would 'see whether it would sort to a happier 
end for this new actor than it did for the old player. 
But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a 
tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was 
brought unto,' owing to Avisa's unrelenting temper. 
Happily, 'time and necessity' effected a cure.^ In 
two succeeding cantos in verse (xlv. and xlvii.) W. S. 
is introduced in dialogue with Willobie, and he gives 
him, in oratio recta, light-hearted and cynical counsel. 
Identity of initials, on which the theory of Shake- 
speare's identity with H. W.'s unfeeling adviser mainly 
rests, is not a strong foundation,^ and it is to be re- 

^ The narrator ends by claiming for his ' discourse ' that in it ' is lively 
represented the unruly rage of unbridled fancy, having the reins to rove 
at liberty, with the divers and sundry changes of affections and tempta- 
tions, which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise.' {Willobie his 
Avisa, ed. C. Hughes, p. 41.) 

^ W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 221 

membered that some attempt was made by a supposi- 
titious editor of the poem to question the veracity 
of the story of the heroine 'Avisa' and her lovers. In 
a preface signed Hadrian Dorell, the writer, after men- 
tioning that the alleged author (Willobie) was dead, 
enigmatically discusses whether or no the work be 'a 
poetical fiction.' In a new edition of 1596 the same 
editor decides the point in the affirmative. But Dorell's 
protestations scarcely carry conviction, and suggest an 
intention to put his readers off the true scent. In any 
case the curious episode of 'W. S.' is left without com- 
ment. The mention of 'W. S.' as 'the old player,' 
and the employment of theatrical imagery in discussing 
his relations with Willobie, must be coupled with the 
fact that Shakespeare, at a date when mentions of him 
in print were rare, was greeted by name as the author of 
'Lucrece' ('And Shakespeare paints poore Lucrece rape') 
in some prefatory verses to the volume. From such 
considerations the theory of Shakespeare's identity with 
'W. S.,' Willobie's acquaintance, acquires substance. If 
we agree that it was Shakespeare who took a roguish 
delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the dis- 
dain of ' chaste Avisa ' because he had ' newly recovered ' 
from the effects of a like experience, it follows that the 
sonnets' tale of the theft of the poet's mistress by his 
friend is no cry of despair springing, as is often 
represented, from the depths of the poet's soul. The 
allusions that were presumably made to the episode by 
the author of 'Avisa' remove it, in fact, from the confines 
of tragedy and bring it nearer those of comedy. 

The story of intrigue which is interpolated in the 
Sonnets has much interest for the student of psychology 

made some reputation in Shakespeare's day. There was a dramatist 
named Wentworth Smith (see p. 260 w. iw/m), and there was a William 
Smith who published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called Chloris in 1595. 
A specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter's 
identity with Willobie's counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has 
the better claim. 



222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and for the literary historian, but the precise propor- 
tion in which it mingles elements of fact and fiction 

does not materially affect the general inter- 
references pretation of the main series of the poems. 
to South- The trend of the story is not out of keeping 
the sonnets with the somewhat complex conditions of Ehza- 
ship'^'^'^' bethan friendship. The vocabulary in which 

professions of EUzabethan friendship were 
phrased justify, as we have seen, the inference that 
Shakespeare's only literary patron, the Earl of Southamp- 
ton, was the hero of the greater number of the sonnets. 
That conclusion is corroborated by such definite personal 
traits as can be deduced from the shadowy eulogies in 
those poems of the youth's gifts and graces. In real 
life beauty, birth, wealth, and wit sat 'crowned' in the 
Earl, whom poets acclaimed the handsomest of Eliza- 
bethan courtiers. Southampton has left in his correspond- 
ence ample proofs of his literary learning and taste, 
and, like the hero of the sonnets, might justly be de- 
clared to be 'as fair in knowledge as in hue.' The open- 
ing sequence of seventeen sonnets, in which a youth is 
admonished to marry and beget a son so that 'his fair 
house' may not fall into decay, was appropriately ad- 
dressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as 
yet unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole 
male representative of his family. The sonnetteer's 
exclamation, 'You had a father, let your son say so,' 
had pertinence to Southampton at any period between 
his father's death in his boyhood and the close of his 
bachelorhood in 1598. To no other peer of the day do 
the words seem to be exactly apphcable. The 'lasciv- 
ious comment' on his 'wanton sport' which pursues the 
young friend through the Sonnets, and adds point to 
the picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, asso- 
ciates itself with the reputation for sensual indulgence 
that Southampton acquired both at Court and, accord- 
ing to Nashe, among men of letters.^ 

^ See p. 664, note i. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 223 

There is no force in the objection that the young man 
of the sonnets of 'friendship' must have been another 
than Southampton because the terms in Hisyouth- 
which he is often addressed imply extreme fulness. 
youth.^ The young man had obviously reached man- 
hood, and Southampton was under twenty-one in 1594, 
when we have good reason to believe that the large 
majority of the sonnets was in course of composition. In 
Sonnet civ. Shakespeare notes that the first meeting 
between him and his friend took place three years be- 
fore that poem was written, so that, if the words are to 
be taken literally, the poet may have at times embodied 
reminiscences of Southampton when he was only seven- 
teen or eighteen.^ But Shakespeare, already worn in 
worldly experience, passed his thirtieth birthday in 
1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of 
middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the noble- 
man almost ten years his junior, who even later im- 
pressed his acquaintances by his boyish appearance and 
disposition.^ 'Young' was the epithet invariably ap- 
plied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him 
even when he was twenty-eight. In 1601 Sir Robert 
Cecil referred to him as the 'poor young Earl.' 

But the most striking evidence of the identity of the 
friend of Shakespeare's sonnets with Southampton is 
found in the likeness of feature and complexion which 
characterises the poet's description of the youth's out- 

^ This objection is chiefly taken by those who unjustifiably assign the 
composition of the sonnets to a date approximating to 1609, the year of 
their pubKcation. 

2 Three years was the conventional period which sonnetteers allotted 
to the development of their passion. Cf. Ronsard, Sonnets pour Helene 
(No. xiv.), beginning: 'Trois ans sont ja passez que ton ceil me tient 
pris.' See French Renaissance in England, p. 267. 

^ Octavius Caesar at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after 
the battle of Actium as the ' boy Caesar ' who ' wears the rose of youth ' 
{Antony and Cleopatra, iii. ii. 17 seq.). Spenser in his Astrophel apostro- 
phises Sir Philip Sidney on his death, near the close of his thirty-second 
year, as 'oh wretched boy' (1. 133) and 'luckless boy' (1. 142). Con- 
versely it was a recognised convention among sonnetteers to exaggerate 
their own age. See p. 156, n. i. 



224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ward appearance and the extant pictures of Southamp- 
ton as a young man. Shakespeare's many references 
Theevi- ^^ ^^^ youth's 'painted counterfeit' (xvi. xxiv. 
denceof xlvii. lx\di.) suggest that his hero often sat for 
portraits, j^^ portrait. Southampton's countenance sur- 
vives in probably more canvases than that of any of his 
contemporaries. At least fifteen extant portraits have 
been identified on good authority — ten paintings, three 
miniatures (two by Peter OHver and one by Isaac 
OHver), and two contemporary prints.^ Most of these, 
it is true, portray their subject in middle age, when the 
roses of youth had faded, and they contribute nothing to 
the present argument. But the two portraits that are 
now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, 
give all the information that can be desired of Southamp- 
ton's aspect 'in his youthful morn.' ^ One of these 
pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one, and the 
other at twenty-five or twenty-six. The earlier por- 
tra,it, which is reproduced on the opposite page, shows a 

^ Two portraits, representing the Earl in early manhood, are at Wel- 
beck Abbey, and are described above. Of the remaining eight paintings 
two have been assigned to Van Somer, and represent the Earl in early 
middle age; one, a full-length in drab doublet and hose, is in the Shake- 
speare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon ; the other, a half-length, 
a charming picture formerly belonging to the late Sir James Knowles,. 
and now to Mrs. Holman Hunt, is more probably by Mireveldt. That 
artist certainly painted the Earl several times at a later period of his 
career ; portraits by Mireveldt are now at Woburn Abbey (the property 
of the Duke of Bedford), at Althorpe, and at the National Portrait 
Gallery. A fifth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount 
Powerscourt; a sixth, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield 
Digby, and the seventh (in armour) is in the Master's Lodge at St. 
John's College, Cambridge, where Southampton was educated. The 
miniature by Isaac Oliver, which also represents Southampton in late 
life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert's collection. It now belongs 
to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver 
belonged respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, 
Bt. (Cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burling- 
ton Fine Arts Club, London, 1889, pp. 32, 71, 100.) In all the best 
preserved of these portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade 
of auburn. Among the middle-life portraits Southampton appears to 
best advantage in the one now the property of Mrs. Holman Hunt. 

2 1 describe these pictures from a personal inspection of them which 
the Duke kindly permitted me to make. 




^TLetint. WHatKcMj&uArtCrc (Dart or CJo-LLt/iampJxnv 
J a-woung, mcLa.iroTTL i/ie eriqXaal nictwre at '^UMfeok. ^ 



^^^uiaSC/i/i.c 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 225 

young man resplendently attired. His doublet is of 
white satin ; a broad coll&.r, edged with lace, half covers 
a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver 
thread ; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced 
with gold ; the sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, 
is decorated at intervals with white silk bows ; the 
hilt of the rapier is overlaid with gold ; purple garters, 
embroidered in silver thread, fasten the white stockings 
below the knee. Light body armour, richly dama- 
scened, lies on the ground to the right of the figure ; 
and a white-plumed helmet stands to the left on a table 
covered with a cloth of purple velvet embroidered in 
gold. Such gorgeous raiment suggests that its wearer 
bestowed much attention on his personal equipment. 
But the head is more interesting than the body. The 
eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, 
and the expression sedate ; rings are in the ears ; beard 
and moustache are at an incipient stage, and are of the 
same bright auburn hue as the hair in a picture of 
Southampton's mother that is also at Welbeck.^ But, 
however scanty is the down on the youth's cheek, the 
hair on his head is luxuriant. It is worn very long, and 
falls over and below the shoulder. The colour is now of 
walnut, but was originally of lighter tint. 

The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years 
later shows him in prison, to which he was committed 
after his secret marriage in 1598. A cat and a book in a 
jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand. Here 
the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater 
profusion, and is distinctly blonde. The beard and thin 
upturned moustache are of brighter auburn and are fuller 
than before, although still slight. The blue eyes and 
colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill health, but differ 
little from those features in the earlier portrait. 

From either of the two Welbeck portraits of South- 

^ Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet iii. : 

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee 
Calls back the lovely April of her prime. 



2 26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ampton might Shakespeare have drawn his picture of 
the youth in the 'Sonnets.' Many times does he tell us 
that the youth is 'fair' in complexion, and that his eyes 
are 'fair.' In Sonnet Ixviii., when he points to the 
youth's face as a map of what beauty was 'without all 
ornament, itself and true ' — before fashion sanctioned 
the use of artificial ' golden tresses ' — there can be 
little doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that 
fell about Southampton's neck.^ 

A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed 
to the youth can be allotted to a date which is very dis- 
tant from 1594; only two bear unmistakable 
cviirthe signs of much later composition. In Sonnet 
last of the jxx. the poet no longer credits his hero with 
juvenile wantonness, but with a 'pure, un- 
stained prime,' which has 'passed by the ambush of 
young days.' Sonnet cvii., apparently the last of the 
series, was penned long after the mass of its companions, 
for it makes references that cannot be ignored to three 
events that took place in 1603 — to Queen Elizabeth's 
death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of 
the Earl of Southampton, who was convicted in 1601 of 
complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and had 
since that year been in prison in the Tower of London. 
The first two events are thus described : 

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured 
And the sad augurs mock their own presage ; 
Incertainties now crown themselves assured 
And peace proclaims olives of endless age. 

It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the 
spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected 

^ Southampton's singularly long hair procured him at times unwelcome 
attentions. When, in January 1598, he struck Ambrose Willoughby, 
an esquire of the body, for asking him to break off, owing to the late- 
ness of the hour, a game of primero that he was playing in the royal 
chamber at Whitehall, the esquire Willoughby is stated to have retaliated 
by 'pulling off some of the Earl's locks.' On the incident being reported 
to the Queen, she 'gave Willoughby thanks for what he did, in the 
presence' {Sydney Papers, ii. 83). 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 227 

turn of events, by which Elizabeth's crown had passed, 
without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the 
revolution that had been foretold as the inevi- ^i^sjon ^^ 
table consequence of Elizabeth's demise was Elizabeth's 
happily averted. Cynthia {i.e. the moon) was ^^* ' 
the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus 
that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke 
Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily fol- 
lowed the same fashion. 'Fair Cynthia's dead' sang 
one. 

Luna's extinct ; and now beholde the sunne 
Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares, 

wrote Henry Petowe in his 'A Fewe Aprill Drops Show- 
ered on the Hearse of Dead Eliza,' 1603. There was 
hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did 
not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. 
One poet asserted that death ' veiled her glory in a cloud 
of night.' Another argued: 'Naught can eclipse her 
light, but that her star will shine in darkest night.' 
A third varied the formula thus : 

When winter had cast off her weed 

Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh ! light most fair.^ 

At the same time James was constantly said to have 
entered on his inheritance 'not with an olive branch in 
his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about 
him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone' 
but to all Europe.^ 

'The drops of this most balmy time,' in this same 
Sonnet cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. 
James came to England in a springtide of Allusions to 
rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned Southamp- 

•/ / ton S TG- 

of the happiest augury. 'All things look lease from 
fresh,' one poet sang, 'to greet his excellence.' prison- 
'The air, the seasons, and the earth' were represented 

^ These quotations are from Sorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on 
Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from 
Chettle's England's Mourning Garment (London, 1603). 

^ Gervase Markham's Honour in her Perfection, 1624. 



2 28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

as in sympathy with the general joy in ' this sweetest of 
all sweet springs.' One source of grief alone was acknow- 
ledged : Southampton was still a prisoner in the Tower, 
'supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.' All men, wrote 
Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the 
Queen's death, wished him at liberty.^ The. wish was 
fulfilled quickly. On April lo, 1603, his prison gates 
were opened by ' a warrant from the King.' So bountiful 
a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain to 
Dudley Carleton two days later, 'raised all men's spir- 
its .. . and the very poets with their idle pamphlets 
promised themselves great things.^ Samuel Daniel and 
John Davies celebrated Southampton's release in buoy- 
ant verse. ^ It is improbable that Shakespeare remained 
silent. ' My love looks fresh,' he wrote in the concluding 
lines of sonnet cvii. and he repeated the conventional 
promise that he had so often made before, that his friend 
should live in his 'poor rhyme,' 'when tyrants' crests 
and tombs of brass are spent.' It is impossible to resist 
the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron 
on the close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare's 
genius had then won for him a public reputation that 
rendered him independent of any private patron's favour, 
and he made no further reference in his writings to the 
patronage that Southampton had extended to him in 
earlier years. But the terms in which he greeted his 
former protector for the last time in verse justify the 
belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of hfe, 
the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of 
Southampton, and was mindful to the last of the en- 
couragement that the young peer offered him while he 
was still on the threshold of the temple of fame. 

The processes of construction which are discernible 
in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' are thus seen to be identical 
with those that are apparent in the rest of his literary 
work. They present one more proof of his punctilious 

1 Manningham's Diary, Camden Soc, p. 148. 

^■Court and Times of James I, i. i. 7. ^ See Appendix rv. 



PATRONAGE OF EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 229 

regard for the demands of public taste, and of his mar- 
vellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting 
for his own purposes the hints of other workers „ 

■1 /- 1 T 1 • 1 r .1 - 1 Summary 

m the field which for the moment engaged ofcon- 
his ■ attention. Most of Shakespeare's 'Son- rispeaLg 
nets' were produced under the incitement of the '^ 
that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, o^^^ets. 
taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its 
way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in 
this country a greater volume of literary energy than has 
been applied to sonnetteering within the same space of 
time here or elsewhere before or since. The thousands 
of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 
and 1597 were of every literary quality, from sublimity 
to inanity, and they illustrated in form and topic every 
known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare's 
collection, which was put together at haphazard and 
published surreptitiously many years after the poems 
were written, was a- medley, at times reaching heights 
of literary excellence that none other scaled, but as a 
whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering 
vogue. Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid 
picturings of the beauties of nature, idealisation of a 
protege's regard for a nobleman in the figurative language 
of amorous passion, vivacious compliments on a woman's 
hair or her touch on the virginals, and vehement de- 
nunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind — ■ 
all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of 
sonnets as in Shakespeare's. He borrows very many 
of his competitors' words and thoughts, but he so fused 
them with his fancy as often to transfigure them. Gen- 
uine emotion or the writer's personal experience inspired 
few Elizabethan sonnets, and no literary historian can 
accept the claim which has been preferred in behalf of 
Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' to be at all points a self-evident 
exception to the general rule. A personal note may 
have escaped the poet involuntarily in the sonnets in 
which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and re- 



230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

morse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is 
no proof that he is doing more there than produce dra- 
matically the illusion of a personal confession. In a 
scattered series of some twelve sonnets he introduced a 
detached topic — a lover's supersession by his friend in 
his mistress's graces : but there again he shows little 
independence of his comrades. He treated a theme 
which was wrought into the web of Renaissance romance, 
and if he sought some added sustenance from an incident 
of his own life, he was inspired, according to collateral 
testimony, by a passing adventure, which deserved a 
smile better than a tear. The sole biographical infer- 
ence which is deducible with full confidence from the 
'Sonnets' is that at one time in his career Shakespeare, 
like the majority of his craft, disdained few weapons of 
flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful 
patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence 
agrees with internal evidence in identifying the belauded 
patron with the Earl of Southampton, and the real value 
to a biographer of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' is the cor- 
roboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the 
Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems 
were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early 
period of his hterary career help and encouragement, 
which entitles the nobleman to a place in the poet's 
biography resembhng that filled by the Duke of Ferrara 
in the early biography of Tasso. 



XIII 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 

All the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring 
his patron 

[How] to no other pass my verses tend 
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell, 

his dramatic work was steadily advancing. While he 
never ceased to garner hints from the labours of others, 
he was during the last years of Queen Elizabeth's long 
reign very surely widening the interval between his own 
dramatic achievement and that of all contemporaries. 

To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs 'Mid- 
summer Night's Dream.' ^ The corriedy may well have 
been written to celebrate a marriage in high society — 
perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, 

1 No edition appeared before 1600. On October 8, 1600, Thomas 
Fisher, formerly a draper, who had only become a freeman of the Sta- 
tioners' Company in the previous June, and remained for a very few 
years a bookseller and publisher (never possessing a printing press), 
obtained a license for the publication of the Dream (Arber, ii. 174). 
The name of Fisher, the publisher, figured alone on the title-page of the 
first quarto of 1600; no printer was mentioned, but the book probably 
came from the press of James Roberts, the printer and publisher of ' the 
players' bills.' The title-page runs: 'A Midsommer Nights Dreame. 
As it hath beene sundry times publil^ely acted, by the Right Honourable, 
the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. 
Imprinted at London for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his 
shoppe at the signe of the White Hart in Fleete Streete 1600.' A second 
quarto, which corrects some misprints in the first version, and was re- 
printed in the First Folio, bears a different printer's device and has the 
brief imprint 'Printed by James Roberts, 1600.' It is ingeniously sug- 
gested that this imprint is a misrepresentation and that the second quarto 
of the Dream was not published before 1619, when it was printed by 
William Jaggard, the successor to Roberts's press, for Thomas Pavier, a 
stationer of doubtful repute. (Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 
1909, pp. 81 seq.) 

231 



232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third Earl of Bed- 
ford, on December 12, 1594; or that at Greenwich on 

January 24, 1594-5, of William Stanley, sixth 
summer Earl of Derby, brother of a former patron of 
Night's^ Shakespeare's company of actors and himself an 

amateur dramatist,^ with Elizabeth, daughter 
of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a wild- 
living nobleman of Hterary proclivities. The elaborate 
compliment to the Queen, 'a fair vestal throned by 
the west' (11. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledg- 
ment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for 
their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful descrip- 
tion (11. ii. 148-68) of the home of the little magical 
flower called 'Love-in-idleness' that he bids Puck fetch 
for him, seems literally to report one of the scenic 
pageants with which the Earl of Leicester entertained 
Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575.^ 

Although the whole play is in the airiest and most 
graceful vein of comedy, it furnishes fresh proof of 
The Shakespeare's studious versatility. The plot 

sources. ingeniously weaves together four independent 
and apparently conflicting threads of incident, for which 
Shakespeare found suggestion in various places. The 
Athenian background, which is dominated by the 
nuptials of Theseus, Duke of Athens, with Hippolyta, 
queen of the Amazons, owes much to the setting of 
Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale.' There Chaucer was himself 
under obligation to Boccaccio's 'Teseide,' a medi£eval 
rendering of classical myth, where the classical vision is 
blurred by a mediaeval haze. For his Greek topic 
Shakespeare may have sought supplementary aid in the 
'Life of Theseus' in Plutarch's storehouse of biography, 
with which his later work shows much familiarity. The 

^ On June 30, 1599, the sixth Earl of Derby was reported to be 'busyed 
only in penning commodyes for the commoun players' {State Papers 
Dom. Eliz., vol. 271, Nos. 34 and 35) ; see p. 52 supra. 

^ See Oheron^s Vision, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society), 
1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth jetes, by George Gascoigne and 
Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 233 

story of the tragicomedy of 'Py ramus and Thisbe/ 
which Bottom and his mates burlesque, is an offspring 
of the dramatist's researches in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses,' 
and direct from the Latin text of the same poem he drew 
the beautiful name of his fairy queen Titania. Oberon 
the king of the fairy world and his ethereal company 
come from 'Huon of Bordeaux,' the French mediaeval 
romance of which a translation by Lord Berners was 
first printed in 1534. The Athenian lovers' quarrels 
sound a more modern note and there is no need for sug- 
gesting a literary origin. Yet the influence of Shake- 
speare's predecessor in comedy, John Lyly, is perceptible 
in the raillery in which both Shakespeare's mortals and 
immortals indulge, and the intermeddling of fairies in 
human affairs is a contrivance in which Lyly made an 
earlier experiment. The humours which mark the pres- 
entation of the play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' improve 
upon a device which Shakespeare had already employed 
in 'Love's Labour's Lost.' The 'rude mechanicals' who 
produce the piece are credited, like the rest of the dram- 
atis personas, with Athenian citizenship ; yet they 
most faithfully reflect the temper of the Elizabethan 
artisan, and their crude mingling of tragic tribulation 
with comic horseplay travesties much extravagance in 
contemporary drama. When all Shakespeare's literary 
debts are taken into account, the final scheme of the 
'Midsummer Night's Dream' remains an example of the 
author's freshest invention. The dramatist endows the 
phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sus- 
tained dramatic interest, which was beyond the reach 
,of Lyly or any forerunner. Shakespeare may indeed be 
said to have conquered in this fairy comedy a new realm 
for art. 

More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of 
'All's Well that Ends Well' of which the original draft 
may be tentatively allotted to 1595. The 'All's 
general treatment illustrates the writer's tight- ^^^^■' 
ening grip on the subtleties of romance. Meres, writing 



234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

in 1598, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called 'Love's 
Labour's Won.' This title, which is not otherwise known, 
may well be applied to 'All's Well.' 'The Taming of 
the Shrew,' which has also been identified with 'Love's 
Labour's Won,' has shghter claim to the designation. 
The main story of 'All's Well' is of Itahan origin. Al- 
though it was accessible, like the plot of 'Romeo and 
Juliet,' in Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' (No. xxxviii.), 
the original source is Boccaccio's 'Decamerone' (Day 
iii. Novel 9). On the old touching story of Helena's 
love for her social superior, the unworthy Bertram, 
Shakespeare, after his wont, grafted the three comic 
characters of the braggart Parolles, whose name is French 
for 'words,' the pompous Lafeu, and a clown (Lavache) 
less witty than his compeers ; all are of the dramatist's 
own devising. Another original creation, Bertram's 
mother, Countess of Roussillon, is a charming portrait 
of old age. 

In spite of the effective relief which is furnished by 
the humours of the boastful coward Parolles, the pathetic 
^j^g element predominates in 'All's Well.' The 

heroine heroine Helena, whose 'pangs of despised love' 
^^^^' are expressed with touching tenderness, ranks, 
in spite of her ultimate defiance of modern standards of 
maidenly modesty, with the greatest of Shakespeare's 
female creations. Shakespeare failed to eliminate from 
his Italian plot all the frankness of Renaissance manners. 
None the less he finally succeeded in enforcing an ideal 
of essential purity and refinement. 

The style of 'All's Well,' in regard both to language 
and to metre, presents a puzzling problem. Early and 
Yj^g late features of Shakespeare's work are per- 

puzzie of plexingly combined. The proportion of rhyme 
t estye. :^^ blank verse is high, and the rhymed verse 
in which epistles are penned by two of the characters 
(in place of prose) is a clear sign of youthful artifice ; 
one letter indeed takes the lyric form of a sonnet. On 
the other hand, nearly half the play is in prose, and the 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 235 

metrical irregularities of the blank verse and its elliptical 
tenour are characteristic of the author's ripest efforts. 
No earlier version of the play than that which appears 
in the First Folio is extant, and the discrepancy of style 
suggests that the Folio text presents a late revision of an 
early draft. 

'The Taming of the Shrew ' — which, like 'All's 
Well,' was first printed in the Folio — was probably com- 
posed soon after the first planning of that solemn < Taming 
comedy. It is a revision of an old play on of the ^ 
lines somewhat differing from those which ^^'^' 
Shakespeare had followed previously. A comedy called 
'The Taming of A Shrew' was produced as an old piece 
at Newington Butts by the conjoined companies of the 
Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain on June 11, 
1594, and was first published in the same year.^ From 
that source Shakespeare drew the Induction (an outer 
dramatic framework) ^ as well as the energetic scenes in 
which the hero Petruchio conquers Katharine the Shrew. 
The dramatist accepted the scheme of the old piece, but 
he first endowed the incident with the vital spirit of 
comedy. While following the old play in its general 
outlines, Shakespeare's revised version added, moreover, 
an entirely new underplot, the intrigue of the shrew's 
younger sister, Bianca, with three rival lovers. That 

^ Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ii. 164. The published quarto described the 
old play as acted by the Earl of Pembroke's company, for whom it was 
•originally written. It was reprintfed by the Shakespeare Society in 
1844, and was re-edited by Prof. F. S. Boas in 1908. 

^ Although comparatively rare, there are many examples in Eliza- 
bethan drama of the device of an Induction or outer framework in which 
a set of characters are presented at the outset as arranging for the pro- 
duction of the substantive piece, and remain on the stage as more or 
less critical spectators of the play through the course of its performance. 
Besides the old play of The Taming of A Shrew Shakespeare may well 
have known George Peek's Old Wives' Tale (1595), Robert Greene's 
King James IV of Scotland (1598), and Anthony Munday's Downfall of 
Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1601), all of which are furnished with an 'in- 
duction ' of the accepted sort. A more critical kind of ' induction ' figures 
in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour (1600) and Cynthia's 
Revels (1601), Marston's Malcontent (1604), and Beaumont and Fletcher's 
Knight of the Burning Pestle (16 13). 



236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

subsidiary woof of fable which is ingeniously interwoven 
with the main web, owes much to the 'Supposes,' an 
The Elizabethan comedy which George Gascoigne 

underplot, adapted from Ariosto's ItaHan comedy 'I Sup- 
positi.' The association has historic interest, for Gas- 
coigne's 'Supposes' made known to Englishmen for the 
first time the modern conception of romantic comedy 
which Italy developed for all Europe out of the classical 
model. Yet evidence of style — the Hberal introduction 
of tags of Latin and the beat of the doggerel — makes 
it difficult to allot the Bianca scenes of the 'Taming of 
the Shrew ' to Shakespeare ; those scenes were probably 
due to a coadjutor. 

The Induction to the 'Taming of the Shrew' has 
a direct bearing on Shakespeare's biography, for the poet 

admits into it a number of literal references to 
allusions Stratford and his native county. Such per- 
ind'^ct" n sonalities are rare in Shakespeare's plays, and 

can only be paralleled in two of slightly later 
date — the 'Second Part of Henry IV' and the 'Merry 
Wives of Windsor.' All these local allusions may well 
be due to such a renewal of Shakespeare's personal re- 
lations with the town, as is indicated by facts in his 
private history of the same period.^ In the Induction 
the tinker, Christopher Sly, describes himself as 'Old 
Sly's son of Burton Heath.' Burton Heath is Barton- 
on-the-Heath, the home of Shakespeare's aunt, Edmund 
Lambert's wife, and of her sons. The Lamberts were 
relatives whom Shakespeare had no reason to regard 
with much favour. The stern hold which Edmund 
Lambert and his son John kept on Asbies, the estate of 
the dramatist's mother, caused his parents continued 
anxiety through his early manhood. The tinker Sly in 
like local vein confesses that he has run up a score with 
Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot.^ The refer- 

1 See p. 280-1 infra. 

^ All these details are of Shakespeare's invention, and do not figure 
in the old play. But in the crude induction there the nondescript 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 237 

ences to Wincot and the Hackets are singularly precise. 
The name of the maid of the inn is given as Cicely Hacket, 
and the alehouse is described in the stage direction as 
'on a heath.' 

Wincot was the familiar designation of three small 
Warwickshire villages, and a good claim has been set up 
on behalf of each to be the scene of Sly's 
drunken exploits. There is a very small hamlet 
named Wincot within four miles of Stratford now con- 
sisting of a single farmhouse which was once an Eliza- 
bethan mansion ; it is situated on what was doubtless 
in Shakespeare's day, before the land there was enclosed, 
an open heath. This Wincot forms part of the parish 
of Quinton, where, according to the parochial registers, 
a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare's day. On 
November 21, 1591, 'Sara Hacket, the daughter of 
Robert Hacket,' was baptised in Quinton church.^ Yet 
by Warwickshire contemporaries the Wincot of the 
'Taming of the Shrew' was unhesitatingly identified 
with Wilnecote, near Tamworth, on the Staffordshire 
border of Warwickshire, at some distance from Strat- 
ford. That village, whose name was pronounced 'Win- 
cot,' was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century, 
a distinction which is not shown by contemporary 
evidence to have belonged to any place of like name. 
The Warwickshire poet. Sir Aston Cokain, within half 
a century of the production of Shakespeare's ' Taming of 
the Shrew,' addressed to 'Mr. Clement Fisher of Win- 
cott' (a well-known resident at Wilnecote) verses which 
begin 

drunkard is named without prefix 'Slie.' That surname, although it 
was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by- 
residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance in the 
old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that 
that piece was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other 
names or references in the old play which can be associated with War- 
wickshire. 

^ Mr. Richard Savage, formerly secretary and librarian of the Birth- 
place Trustees at Stratford, generously placed at my disposal this in- 
teresting fact, which he discovered. 



238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renowned, 
That fox'd a Beggar so (by chance was found 
Sleeping) that there needed not many a word 
To make him to believe he was a Lord. 

In the succeeding lines the writer promises to visit ' Win- 
cot' {i.e. Wilnecote) to drink 

Such ale as Shakespeare fancies 
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances.^ 

It is therefore probable that Shakespeare consciously 
invested the home of Kit Sly and of Kit's hostess with 
characteristics of Wilnecote as well as of the hamlet near 
Stratford. 

Wilmcote, the native place of Shakespeare's mother, 
is also said to have been popularly pronounced 'Wincot.' 
A tradition which was first recorded by Capell as late as 
1780 in his notes to the 'Taming of the Shrew' (p. 26) 
is to the effect that Shakespeare often visited an inn at 
'Wincot' to enjoy the society of a 'fool who belonged 
to a neighbouring mill/ and the Wincot of this story is, 
we are told, locally associated with the village of Wilm- 
cote. But the links that connect Shakespeare's tinker 
with Wilmcote are far slighter than those which connect 
him with Wincot and Wilnecote. 

The mention of Kit Sly's tavern comrades — 

Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, 
And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell — 

was in all Hkelihood a reminiscence of contemporary 
Warwickshire life as literal as the name of the hamlet 
where the drunkard dwelt. There was a genuine Stephen 
Sly who was in the dramatist's day a self-assertive citizen 
of Stratford; and 'Greece,' whence 'old John Naps' 
derived his cognomen, is an obvious misreading of Greet, 
a hamlet by Winchcomb in Gloucestershire, not far 
removed from Shakespeare's native town.^ 

^ Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. 224 (mispaged 124), 
^ According to local tradition Shakespeare was acquainted with Greet, 
Winchcomb, and all the villages in the immediate neighbourhood. He 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 239 

In 1597 Shakespeare turned once more to English 
history. He studied anew HoKnshed's 'Chronicle.' At 
the same time he carefully examined a value- 'Henry 
less but very popular piece, 'The Famous ^^■' 
Victories of Henry V, containing the Honourable battle 
of Agincourt/ which was repeatedly acted by the Queen's 
company of players between 1588' and 1595.^ The 
'Famous Victories' opens with a perfunctory sketch of 
Henry IV's last years ; in the crudest spirit of farce 
Prince Hal, while heir apparent, engages in roistering 
horseplay with disreputable associates ; the later scenes 
present the most stirring events of his reign. From 
HoHnshed and the old piece Shakespeare worked up with 
splendid energy two plays on the reign of Henry IV, 
with an independent sequel on the reign of Henry V — 
the three plays forming together the supreme trilogy in 
the range of history drama. 

Shakespeare's two plays concerning Henry IV are 
continuous in subject matter ; they are known respectively 
as Parts I. and II. of 'Henry IV.' The First ^j^^ 
Part carries the historic episode from the close historical 
of the play of 'Richard II' down to the battle ^^"'^""^• 
of Shrewsbury on July 21, 1403, when Henry IV, Richard 
II's successor on the throne, triumphed over the rebellion 
of his new subjects. The Second Part treats more 
cursorily of the remaining ten years of Henry IV's reign 
and ends with that monarch's collapse under the strain 
of kingly cares and with the coronation of his son Henry 

is still credited with the authorship of the local jingle which enumerates 
the chief hamlets and points of interest in the district. The lines run : 

Dirty Gretton, dingy Greet, 
Beggarly Winchcomb, Sudely sweet ; 
Hartshorn and Wittington Bell, 
Andoversford and Merry Frog Mill. 

^ It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598 as 
acted by the Queen's company. A re-issue of 161 7 credits the King's 
company (i.e. Shakespeare's company) with its production — a fraudu- 
lent device of the publisher to identify it with Shakespeare's work. 



240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

V. The main theme of the two pieces is serious in the 
extreme. Henry IV is a figure of gloom, and a cause of 
gloom in his environment. But Shakespeare, boldly 
improving on the example of the primitive old play of 
'The Famous Victories' and of much other historical 
drama, Hnked to the tragic scheme his most convincing 
portrayal of broad and comprehensive humour. 

The 'Second Part of Henry IV' is almost as rich as 
the Induction to 'The Taming of the Shrew' in direct 
j^^^g references to persons and districts familiar 

Stratford to Shakcspcarc. Two amusing scenes pass 
memories. ^^ ^-^e house of Justicc Shallow in Gloucester- 
shire, a county which touched the boundaries of Stratford 
(hi. ii. and v. i.). Justice Shallow, as we have seen, 
boldly caricatures Sir Thomas Lucy, a bugbear of Shake- 
speare's youth at Stratford, the owner of the neighbouring 
estate of Charlecote.^ When, in the play, the justice's 
factotum, Davy, asked his master 'to countenance Wil- 
liam Visor of Woncot ^ against Clement Perkes of the 
Hill,' the allusions are unmistakable to persons and 
places within the dramatist's personal cognisance. The 
Gloucestershire village of Woodmancote, where the fam- 
ily of Visor or Vizard has flourished since the sixteenth 
century, is still pronounced Woncot. The adjoining 
Stinchcombe Hill (still famiharly known to natives as 
' The Hill ') was in the sixteenth century the home of the 
family of Perkes. Very precise too are the allusions to 
the region of the Cotswold Hills, which were easily 
accessible from Stratford. 'Will Squele, a Cotswold 
man,' is noticed as one of Shallow's friends in youth 
(hi. ii. 23) ; and when Shallow's servant Davy receives 
his master's instructions to sow 'the headland' 'with 
red wheat' in the early autumn, there is an obvious 
reference to the custom almost peculiar to the Cotswolds 

^ See pp. 35-6 supra. 

2 The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote: all the folios read Woncot. 
Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted 
reading of Wincot, which has been unwisely adopted by succeeding 
editors. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 241 

of sowing 'red lammas' wheat at an unusually early 
season of the agricultural year.^ 

The kingly hero of the two plays of 'Henry IV' had 
figured under his princely name of Henry Bolingbroke 
as a spirited young man in ' Richard II ' ; he 
was now represented as weighed down by care Henfy iv 
and age. With him are contrasted (in Part I.) ^^^J^^^ 
his impetuous and ambitious subject Hotspur 
and (in both Parts) his son and heir Prince Hal, whose 
boisterous and restless disposition drives him from Court 
to seek adventures among the haunters of taverns. Hot- 
spur is a vivid and fascinating portrait of a hot-headed 
soldier, courageous to the point of rashness, and sacri- 
ficing his life to his impetuous sense of honour. Prince 
Hal, despite his riotous vagaries, is endowed by the 
dramatist with far more self-control and common sense. 

On the first, as on every subsequent, production of 
'Henry IV ' the main public interest was concentrated 
neither on the King nor on his son, nor on Hot- , „ 

. • Falstaff 

spur, but on the chief of Prince Hal's riotous 
companions. In the old play of 'The Famous Victories' 
the Prince at the head of a crew of needy rufhans robs 
the royal tax-collectors on Gadshill or drinks and riots in 
a tavern in Eastcheap, while a clown of the traditional 
stamp who is finally impressed for the war adds to the 
merriment by gulling a number of simple tradesmen and 
artisans. Shakespeare was not blind to the hints of the 
old drama, but he touched its comic scenes with a magic 
of his own and summoned out of its dust and ashes the 
radiance of his inimitable Falstaff. 

At the outset the propriety of that great creation was 
questioned on a political or historical ground of doubt- 
ful relevance. Shakespeare in both parts of The first 
'Henry IV' originally named the chief of the potest. 
Prince's associates after a serious Lollard leader. Sir 

^ These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden 
in his Diary of Master Silence, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Cf. Blunt's Dursley 
and its Neighbourhood, Huntley's Glossary of the Cotswold Dialect, and 
Marshall's Rural Economy of Cotswold (1796). 



242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

John Oldcastle, a very subordinate and shadowy char- 
acter in the old play. But influential objection was 
taken by Henry Brooke, eighth Lord Cobham, who suc- 
ceeded to the title on March 5, 1596-7, and claimed 
descent in the female line from the historical Sir John 
Oldcastle, the Lollard leader, who had sat in the House 
of Lords as Lord Cobham. The new Lord Cobham's 
father, William Brooke, the seventh lord, had filled the 
office of Lord Chamberlain for some seven months before 
his death(August8, 1596-March 5, 1597) and had betrayed 
Puritanic prejudices in his attitude to the acting pro- 
fession. The new Lord Cobham showed himself a loyal 
son in protesting against the misuse on the stage of his 
Lollard ancestor's appellation. Shakespeare met the 
objection by bestowing on Prince Hal's tunbellied fol- 
lower the new and deathless name of Falstaff. When 
the First Part of Shakespeare's 'Henry IV' was licensed 
for pubHcation on February 25, 1597-8,^ the name of 

1 Andrew Wise, the publisher in 1597 of Richard II and Richard III, 
obtained on February 25, 1597-8, a license for the publication of the his- 
torye of Henry iiij^^ with his battaile of Shreivshurye against Henry Hot- 
spurre of the Northe with the conceipted mirthe of Sir John Falstajf (Arber, 
iii. 105). This quarto, which, although it bore no author's name, pre- 
sented a satisfactory version of Shakespeare's text, was printed for Wise 
by Peter Short at the Star on Bread Street Hill. A second edition 
'newly corrected by W. Shake-speare ' was printed for Wise by a different 
printer, Simon Stafford of Adling Hill, near Carter Lane, in 1599. 
Wise made over his interest in this First Part of Henry IV on June 25, 
1603, to Matthew Lawe of St. Paul's Churchyard, who produced new 
editions in 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622. The First Folio text gives with 
some correction the Quarto of 1613. Meanwhile Wise had entered into 
partnership with another bookseller, William Aspley, of the Parrot in 
St. Paul's Churchyard in 1600, and Wise and Aspley Jointly obtained on 
August 23, 1600, a license to publish both Much Ado about Nothing and 
the Second Parte of the history of Kinge Henry the iiij'^ with the humours 
of Sir John Fallstajf, wrytten by Master Shakespere (Arber, iii. 170-1). 
This is the earliest mention of Shakespeare's name in the Stationers' 
Register. In previous entries of his plays no author's name was given. 
The original edition of the Second Part of Henry IV was printed for Wise 
by Valentine Simmes (or Sims) in 1600 : it followed an abbreviated acting 
version ; most exemplars omit Act III Sc. i., which only appears in a few 
copies on two inserted leaves. A second edition was reached before the 
close of the year. There was no reissue of the Quarto. The First Folio 
of 1623 adopted a different and a rather fuller version of Shakespeare's 
text of 2 Henry IV. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 243 

Falstaff was already substituted for that of Oldcastle 
in the title. Yet the text preserved a relic of the earlier 
name in Prince Hal's apostrophe of Falstaff as 'my old 
lad of the Castle^ (i. ii. 40). A less trustworthy edition 
of the Second Part of 'Henry IV' also appeared with 
Falstaff 's name in the place of that of Oldcastle in 1600. 
There the epilogue ironically denied that Falstaff had any 
characteristic in common with the martyr Oldcastle : 
' Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.' Again, 
however, the text retained tell-tale marks ; the abbrevia- 
tion 'Old.' stood before one of Falstaff's speeches (i. ii. 
114), and Falstaff was credited like the genuine Oldcastle 
with serving in boyhood as 'page to Thomas Mowbray, 
Duke of Norfolk' (iii. ii. 24-5). Nor did the employ- 
ment of the name 'Falstaff' silence all cavilling. The 
new name hazily recalled Sir John Fastolf, an historical 
warrior of repute and wealth of the fifteenth century who 
had already figured in the First Part of 'Henry VI,' and 
was owner at one time of the Boar's Head Tavern in 
Southwark.^ An Oxford scholar, Dr. Richard James, 
writing about 1625, protested that Shakespeare, after 
offending Sir John Oldcastle's descendants by giving his 
'buffoon' the name of that resolute martyr, 'was put 
to make an ignorant shift of abusing Sir John Fastolf, 
a man not inferior in vertue, though not so famous in 
piety as the other.' ^ George Daniel of Beswick, the 
Cavalier poet, similarly complained in 1647 of the ill 
use to which Shakespeare had put Fastolf's name in 
order to escape the imputation of vilifying the Lollard 
leader.^ Furthermore Fuller, in his 'Worthies,' first 
published in 1662, while expressing satisfaction that 

^ According to traditional stage directions, first adopted by Theobald 
in 1733, the Prince and his companions in Henry IV frequent the Boar's 
Head in Eastcheap, a popular tavern where plays were occasionally 
performed. Eastcheap is several times mentioned in Shakespeare's text 
as the scene of Falstaff's revels, but the tavern is not described more 
specifically than as 'the old place' (2 Henry IV, 11. ii. 161). 

2 James MS. 34, Bodleian Library, Oxford; cf. Halliwell, On the 
Character of Sir John Falstaff, 1841, pp. 19, 20. 

* George Daniel's Poems, ed. Grosart, 1878, pp. 112-13. 



244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare had 'put out' of the play Sir John Old- 
castle, was eloquent in his avowal of regret that 'Sir 
John Fastolf was 'put in/ on the ground that it was 
making overbold with a great warrior's memory to 
make him a 'Thrasonical puff and emblem of mock 
valour.' 

The offending introduction and withdrawal of Old- 
castle's name left a curious mark on literary history. 
Faistaff ^^ many as four humbler men of letters (An- 
and thony Munday, Robert Wilson, Michael 

oidcastie. j)j-ayton, and Richard Hathaway), seeking to 
profit by the attention drawn by Shakespeare to the his- 
torical Oidcastie, combined to produce a poor dramatic 
version of that worthy genuine history. They pretended 
to vindicate the Lollard's memory from the slur that 
Shakespeare's identification of him with his fat knight 
had cast upon it.^ This unimpressive counterstroke was 
produced by the Lord Admiral's company in the autumn 
of 1599 and was received with favour. It was, like Shake- 
speare's 'Henry IV,' in two parts, and when the second 
part was revived in the autumn of 1602 Thomas Dekker, 
the well-known writer, whose versatile capacity gave him 
an uncertain livelihood and left him open to the tempta- 
tion of a bribe, was employed to make additions to the 
original draft. Shakespeare was obviously innocent of 
any share in this many-handed piece of hack-work, two 
of whose contrivers, Drayton and Dekker, were capable 
of more dignified occupation. Nevertheless of two early 
editions of the first part of ' Sir John Oidcastie ' bearing 
the date 1600, one 'printed for T[homas] P[avier]' was 
impudently described on the title-page as by Shakespeare, 
and the false description misled innocent editors of 
Shakespeare's collective works in the second half of the 

^ In the prologue to the play of Oidcastie (1600) appear the lines : 

It is no pampered glutton we present, 
Nor aged councellor to youthful sinne ; 
But one whose vertue shone above the rest, 
A valiant martyr and a vertuous Peere. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 245 

seventeenth century into including the feeble dramatic 
reply to Shakespeare's work among his own writings.^ 
The second part of 'Sir John Oldcastle' has vanished. 
Non-dramatic literature was also enlisted in the con- 
troversy over Shakespeare's alleged defamation of the 
historic Oldcastle's character. John Weever, an anti- 
quarian poet, pursued the dramatists' path of rehabili- 
tation. In 1 60 1 he issued a narrative poem entitled 
'The Mirror of Martyrs or the Life and Death of that 
thrice valiant capitaine and most godly martyr Sir 
John Oldcastle Knight — Lord Cobham. Printed by 
V[alentine] S[immes] for William Wood.' Weever calls 
his 'mirror' 'the true Oldcastle' and cites incidentally 
phrases from the Second Part of 'Henry IV' which by 
covert implication convict Shakespeare of fathering ' the 
false Oldcastle.' 

But none of the historical traditions which are con- 
nected with Falstaff helped him to his fame. His peren- 
nial attraction is fruit of the personality owing jr^igtaff's 
nothing to history with which Shakespeare's personal- 
imaginative power clothed him. The knight's ^^^' 
unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant 
mendacity, and his love of his own ease are purged of 
offence by his colossal wit and jollity, while the contrast 
between his old age and his unreverend way of Hfe sup- 



^ The early edition of The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle, with Shake- 
speare's name on the title-page and bearing the date 1600, is believed 
to have been deliberately antedated by the publisher Pavier, and to have 
been actually published by him some years later — in 1619 — at the 
press of William Jaggard. It is not easy to reconcile with the facts of 
the situation the report of the gossiping letterwriter Roland Whyte 
(Sydney Papers, ii. 175) to the effect that the Lord Chamberlain's [i.e. 
Shakespeare's] company acted 'Sir JohnOldcastle with good contentment ' 
on March 6, 1 599-1 600 at Lord Hunsdon's private house, after a dinner 
given in honour of a Flemish envoy to the English court. It is highly 
improbable that the Lord Chamberlain's players would have performed 
the piece of ' Sir John Oldcastle,' which was written for the Lord Admiral's 
company, in opposition to Shakespeare's / Henry IV. The reporter 
was doubtless referring hastily to Shakespeare's i Henry IV and gave it 
the name of Sir John Oldcastle which the character of Falstaff originally 
bore. 



246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

plies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable from 
the highest manifestations of humour. His talk is always 
in prose of a rarely matched pith. The Elizabethan 
pubhc, despite the protests of historical critics, recog- 
nised the triumphant success of the effort, and many of 
Falstaff's telling phrases, with the names of his foils, 
Justices Shallow and Silence, at once took root in popular 
speech. Shakespeare's purely comic power culminated 
in Falstaff ; he may be claimed as the most humorous 
figure in literature. 

In all probability 'The Merry Wives of Windsor,' 
a domestic comedy inclining to farce, followed close upon 
'Mer 'Henry IV.' The piece is unqualified by any 

Wives of _ pathetic interest. The low-pitched sentiment 
Windsor. -^ (.Q^(.j^g(j [^ ^ colloquial vein. The high ratio 
of prose to verse finds no parallel elsewhere in Shake- 
speare's work. Of the 3000 lines of the 'Merry Wives' 
only one tenth is in metre. 

In the epilogue to the 'Second Part of Henry IV' 
Shakespeare had written : ' If you be not too much cloyed 
Falstaff with fat meat, our humble author will continue 
and Queen the story with Sir John in it . . . where for 
Elizabeth, anything I know Falstaff shall die of a sweat, 
unless already a' be killed with your hard opinions.' 
Falstaff was not destined to the fate which the dramatist 
airily foreshadowed. External influence gave an un- 
expected turn to Sir John's career. Rowe asserts that 
Queen Ehzabeth ' was so well pleased with that admirable 
character of Falstaff in the two parts of "Henry IV" 
that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, 
and to show him in love.' John Dennis, the literary 
critic of Queen Anne's era, in the dedication of a tasteless 
adaptation of the 'Merry Wives' which he called 'The 
Comical Gallant' (1702), noted that the 'Merry Wives' 
was written at Queen EUzabeth's ' command and by her 
direction ; and she was so eager to see it acted that she 
commanded it to be finished in fourteen days, and was 
afterwards, as tradition tells us, very well pleased with the 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 247 

representation.' ^ In his 'Letters' ^ Dennis reduces the 
period of composition to ten days — 'a prodigious thing,' 
added Gildon,^ where all is so well contrived and carried 
on without the least confusion.' The localisation of the 
scene at Windsor, and the complimentary references to 
Windsor Castle, corroborate the tradition that the comedy 
was prepared to meet a royal command. The tradition 
is very plausible. But the royal suggestion failed to 
preserve the vital interest of the comedy from an ' alacrity 
in sinking.' Although Falstaff is the central figure, he 
is a, mere caricature of his former self. His power of 
retort has decayed, and the laugh invariably turns 
against him. In name only is he identical with the po- 
tent humourist of 'Henry IV.' 

The matrimonial adventures out of which the plot of 
the 'Merry Wives' is woven formed a frequent and a 
characteristic feature of Italian fiction. The 
Italian novehst deUghted in presenting the ^ p ° • 
amorous intrigues of matrons who by farcical tricks lulled 
their jealous husbands' suspicions, and they were at the 
same time expert devisers of innocent deceits which 
faithful wives might practise on foolish amorists. Much 
Italian fiction of the kind would seem to have been ac- 
cessible to Shakespeare. A tale from Straparola's 
'Notti' (iv. 4), of which an adaptation figured in the 
miscellany of novels called Tarleton's 'Newes out of 
Purgatorie' (1590), another Italian tale from the 'Peco- 
rone' of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino (i. 2), and a third ro- 
mance, the Fishwife's tale of Brainford in the collection 
of stories, drawn from Italian sources, called 'Westward 
for Smelts,' ^ all supply incidents of matrimonial strategy 

^ In the prologue to his adaptation Dennis repeated the story : 

But Shakespeare's Play in fourteen days was writ, 

And in that space to make all just and fit, 

Was an attempt surpassing human Wit. 

Yet our great Shakespeare's matchless Muse was such. 

None e'er in so small time perform'd so much. 

^ 1721, p. 232. 3 Remarks, p. 291. 

^ This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to 



248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

against dissolute gallantry and marital jealousy which 
resemble episodes in Shakespeare's comedy. Yet in 
spite of the Italian affinities of the fable and of Falstaff's 
rather cosmopolitan degeneracy, Shakespeare has no- 
where so vividly reflected the bluff temper of average 
EngKsh men and women in contemporary middle-class 
society. The presentation of the buoyant domestic life 
of an EHzabethan country town bears, too, distinctive 
marks of Shakespeare's own experience. Again, there 
are literal references to the neighbourhood of Stratford. 
Justice Shallow reappears, and his coat-of-arms, which 
is described as consisting of 'luces,' openly identifies 
him with Shakespeare's early foe, Sir Thomas Lucy of 
Charlecote.^ When Shakespeare makes Master Slender 
repeat the report that Master Page's fallow greyhound 
was 'outrun on Cotsall' (i. i. 93), he testifies to his 
interest in the coursing matches for which the Cotswold 
district was famed at the period. A topical allusion of a 
different kind and one rare in Shakespearean drama is 
made in some detail at the end of the play. One of the 
characters, the Host of the Garter Inn at Windsor, re- 
calls bitterly and with literal frankness the losses which 
tavernkeepers of Reading, Maidenhead, and Colebrook 
actually incurred some years before at the hands of a 
German tourist, one Frederick Duke of Wirtemberg, 
who, while travelling incognito as Count Mompelgard, 
had been granted by Queen Elizabeth's government the 
right to requisition posthorses free of charge. The 
'Duke de Jamany' made liberal use of his privilege 
and the absence of official compensation is the griev- 
ance to which Shakespeare's candid 'Host' gives loud 
voice. 

The imperfections of the surviving text of the 'Merry 



have been published in 1603,, although no edition earlier than 1620 is 
now known. The 1620 edition of Westward for Smelts, written by Kinde 
Kit of Kingston, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf. Shake- 
speare's Library, ed. Hazlitt, i. ii. 1-80. 
^ See p. 35-6 supra. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 249 

Wives' graphically illustrate the risks of injury to which 
the publishing methods of his day exposed Shakespeare's 
work. A license for the pubKcation of the ^^^ ^.^^^ ^^ 
play was granted by the Stationers' Company 'The Merry 
to the stationer John Busby of the Crane in ^'^^^■ 
St. Paul's Churchyard, on January 18, 1601-2.^ A very 
imperfect draft was printed in 1602 by Thomas Creede, 
the well-known printer of Thames Street, and was pub- 
lished at the ' Fleur de Luce ' in St. Paul's Churchyard by 
Arthur Johnson, who took the venture over from Busby 
on the same day as the latter procured his license. The 
inflated title-page ran : ' A most pleasaunt and excellent 
conceited comedie, of Syr lohn Falstaffe, and the merrie 
Wiues of Windsor. Entermixed with sundrie variable 
and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, 
Justice Shallow, and his wise Cousin M. Slender. With 
the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll and Corporall 
Nym. By William Shakespeare. As it hath bene diuers 
times Acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamber- 
laines seruants. Both before her Maiestie, and elsewhere. ' 
The incoherences of this edition show that it was pre- 
pared either from a transcript of ignorant shorthand 
notes taken in the theatre or, less probably, from a report 
of the play made in longhand from memory. In any 
case the version of the play at the printers' disposal was 
based on a drastic abbreviation of the author's draft. 
This crude edition was reissued without change in 1619, 
by Arthur Johnson, the former publisher. A far better 
and far fuller text happily figured in the First Folio of 
1623. Several speeches of the First Quarto were omitted, 
but many passages of importance were printed for the 
first time. The First Folio editors clearly had access to 
a version of the piece v^^hich widely differed from that of 
the original quarto. But the Folio manuscript also 
bears traces of mutilation for stage purposes, and though 
a joint recension of the Quarto and the Folio texts 
presents an intelHgible whole, we cannot confidently 

^ Arber, iii. 199 ; Pollard, 45 seq. 



250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

claim to know from the existing evidence the precise 
shape in which the play left Shakespeare's hand.^ 

The spirited character of Prince Hal (in 'Henry IV ') 

was peculiarly congenial to its creator, and in the play of 

, 'Henry V Shakespeare, during 1598, brought 

^^^^ ' his career to its zenith. The piece was per- 
formed early in 1599, probably in the newly built Globe 
theatre — 'this wooden O' of the opening chorus. 
Again printers and publishers combined to issue to the 
reading public a reckless perversion of Shakespeare's 
manuscript. A piratical and incompetent shorthand 
reporter was responsible for the text of the 

The text • • • 

first edition which appeared in quarto m 1600. 
Half of the play was ignored. There were no choruses, 
and much of the prose, in which a great part of the play 
was written, was printed in separate lines of unequal 
lengths as if it had been intended to be verse. A note 
in the register of the Stationers' Company dated August 
4, 1600, runs: 'Henry the fhft, a booke, to be staled.' 
Yet in spite of the order of a stay of publication, the book 
was published in the same year. The publishers were 
jointly Thomas Millington of Cornhill and John Busby 
of St. Paul's Churchyard.^ The printer was Thomas 

^ The First Quarto was reprinted as ' The first sketch of The Merry 
Wives' in 1842, ed. by J. O. Halliwell for the Shakespeare Society. A 
photolithographic facsimile appeared in 1881 with a valuable introduc- 
tion by P. A. Daniel. A typed facsimile was very fully edited by Mr. 
W. W. Greg for the Clarendon Press in 19 10. 

2 Milhngton had published the first edition of 'Titus' (1594) with 
Edward White, and was responsible for two editions of both The Conten- 
tion (1594 and 1600) and True Tragedie (159S and 1600) — the first 
drafts respectively of Shakespeare's second and third parts of Henry VI. 
Busby, Millington's partner in Henry V, acquired on January 18, 1601-2 
a license for the Merry Wives only to part with it immediately to Arthur 
Johnson. In like fashion Busby and Millington made over their in- 
terest in Henry V before August 14, 1600, to Thomas Pavier of Cornhill, 
an irresponsible pirate, who undertook the disreputable reissue of 1602 
(Arber, iii. 169). It was Pavier who published the plays of Sir John 
Oldcaslle (doubtfully dated 1600) and the Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) under 
the fraudulent pretence that Shakespeare was their author. A third 
uncorrected reprint of Henry V — 'Printed for T. P. 1608' — seems 
to be deliberately misdated and to have been first issued by Pavier in 
1 6 19 at the press of William Jaggard. (See Pollard, Shakespeare Folios 
a'/id Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq.) 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 251 

Creede of Thames Street, who had just proved his 
recklessness in his treatment of the First Quarto of the 
'Merry Wives.' There were two reprints of this dis- 
reputable volume — ostensibly dated in 1602 and 1608 
— before an adequate presentation of the piece appeared 
for the first time in the First FoHo of 1623. There the 
1623 lines of the piratical quarto gave way to an im- 
proved text of more than twice the length. 

The dramatic interest of 'Henry V is slender. In 
construction the play resembles a military pageant. The 
events, which mainly concern Henry V's wars popularity 
in France, bring the reign as far as the treaty of the 
of peace and the King's engagement to the ^°^^'^' 
French princess. The climax is reached earlier, in 
the brilliant victory of the English at Agincourt, which 
powerfully appealed to patriotic sentiment. Holinshed's 
' Chronicle' and the crude drama of the 'Famous Victories 
of Henry the Fift' are both laid under generous contri- 
bution. The argument indeed enjoyed already an ex- 
ceptionally wide popularity. Another piece ('Harry 
the V) which the Admiral's company produced under 
Henslowe's managership for the first time on November 
28, 1595, was repeated thirteen times within the follow- 
ing eight months. That piece, which has disappeared, 
may have stimulated Shakespeare's interest in the 
theme if it did not offer him supplementary hints for its 
development.-^ 

In 'Henry V Shakespeare incidentally manipulated 
on somewhat original lines a dramatic device of classical 
descent. At the opening of each act he intro- The 
duces a character in the part of prologue or ciioruses. 
'chorus' or interpreter of the coming scene. 'Henry 
V is the only play of Shakespeare in which every fresh 
act is heralded thus. Elsewhere two of the five acts, 
as in 'Romeo and Juliet,' or only one of the acts, as in the 
Second Part of 'Henry IV,' is similarly introduced. 
Nowhere, too, is such real service rendered to the progress 

^ Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 177. 



252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of the story by the 'chorus' as in 'Henry V,' nor are the 
speeches so long or so memorable. The choric prologues 
of 'Henry V are characterised by exceptional solemnity 
and sublimity of phrase, by a lyric fervour and philo- 
sophical temper which sets them among the greatest 
of Shakespeare's monologues. Through the first, and 
the last, runs an almost passionate appeal to the spec- 
tators to bring their highest powers of imagination to 
the realisation of the dramatist's theme. 

As in the 'Famous Victories' and in the two parts of 
'Henry IV,' there is abundance of comic element in 
^j^g 'Henry V,' but death has removed Falstaff, 

soldiers in whosc last moments are described with the 
t ecast. simple pathos that comes of a matchless 
art, and, though Falstaff's companions survive, they are 
thin shadows of his substantial figure. New comic 
characters are introduced in the persons of three soldiers 
respectively of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationality, 
whose racial traits are contrasted with effect. The 
irascible Irishman, Captain MacMorris, is the only 
representative of his nation who figures in the long list 
of Shakespeare's dramatis personcB. The Scot James is 
stohd and undemonstrative. The scene in which the 
pedantic but patriotic Welsh captain, Fluellen, avenges 
the sneers of the braggart Pistol at his nation's emblem, 
by forcing him to eat the leek, overflows in vivacious 
humour. There are also original and lifelike sketches 
of two English private soldiers, WilHams and Bates. On 
the royal hero's manliness, whether as soldier, ruler, or 
lover, Shakespeare loses no opportunity of laying empha- 
sis. In no other play has he cast a man so entirely in 
the heroic mould. Alone in Shakespeare's gallery of 
EngHsh monarchs does Henry's portrait evoke at once a 
joyous sense of satisfaction in the high potentialities of 
human character .and a feehng of pride among English- 
men that one of his mettle is of EngHsh race. 'Henry 
V may be regarded as Shakespeare's final experiment in 
the dramatisation of Enghsh history, and it artistically 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 253 

and patriotically rounds off the series of his 'histories' 
which form collectively a kind of national epic. For 
'Henry VIII,' which was produced very late in his 
career, Shakespeare was only in part responsible, and that 
'history' consequently belongs to a different category. 

A glimpse of autobiography may be discerned in the 
direct mention by Shakespeare in ' Henry V ' of an excit- 
ing episode in current history. At the time of 
the composition of 'Henry V public attention speareand 
was riveted on the exploits of the impetuous the Earl 
Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, whose 
virtues and defects had the faculty of evoking immense 
popularity. Early in 1599, he had tempted fate by ac- 
cepting the appointment of lord deputy of Ireland where 
the native Irish were rebelling against English rule. He 
left London for Dublin on March 27, 1599, and he rode 
forth from the English capital amid the deafening plaudits 
of the populace.^ Very confident was the general hope 
that he would gloriously pacify the distracted province. 
The Earl's close friend Southampton, Shakespeare's 
patron, bore him company and the dramatist shared in 
the general expectation of an early triumphant home- 
coming. 

In the prologue or 'chorus' to the last act of 'Henry 
V ' Shakespeare foretold for the Earl of Essex Essex and 
an enthusiastic reception by the people of ^^^^l^^ ^f 
London when he should return after 'broach- 1601. 
ing' rebellion in Ireland. 

Were now the general of our gracious empress, 
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, 
Bringing rebeUion broached on his sword, 
How many would the peaceful city quit 
To welcome him ! (Act v. Chorus, 11. 30-4.) 

^ Cf. Stew's ^«wa/^, ed. Howes, 1631, p. 788: 'The twentie seuen 
of March, 1599, about two a clocke in the afternoone, Robert Earle of 
Essex, Vicegerent of Ireland, &c., tooke horse in Seeding Lane, and from 
thence beeing accompanied with diuers Noblemen, and many others, 
himselfe very plainely attired, roade through Grace-streete, Cornehill, 
Cheapeside, and other high streetes, in all which places, and in the fieldes, 
the people pressed exceedingly to behold him, especially in the highwayes 



254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

But Shakespeare's prognostication was woefully belied. 
Essex's Irish policy failed. He proved unequal to the 
task which was set him. Instead of a glorious fulfilment 
of his Irish charge he, soon after ' Henry V ' was produced, 
crept back hurriedly to London, with his work undone, 
and under orders to stand his trial for disobedience to 
royal directions and for neglect of duty. Dismissed after 
tedious litigation from all offices of state (on August 26, 
1600), Essex saw his hopes fatally blighted. With a 
view to recovering his position, he thereupon formed the 
desperate resolve of forcibly removing from the Queen's 
councils those to whom he attributed his ruin. South- 
ampton and other young men of social position joined 
in the reckless plot. They vainly counted on the good- 
will of the citizens of London. When the year 1601 
opened, the conspirators were completing their plans, 
and Shakespeare's sympathetic reference to Essex's 
popularity with Londoners bore fruit of some peril to 
his theatrical colleagues, if not to himself. 

On the eve of the projected rising, a few of the rebel 
leaders, doubtless at Southampton's suggestion, sought 
The Globe ^^^ dramatist's countenance. They paid 405. 
and Essex's to Augustinc Phillips, a leading member of 
rebeiUon. Shakespeare's company and a close friend of 
the dramatist, to induce him to revive at the Globe 
theatre 'the play of the deposing and murder of King 
Richard the Second' (beyond doubt Shakespeare's play), 
in the hope that its scenes of the deposition and killing of 
a king might encourage a popular outbreak. Phillips 
prudently told the conspirators who bespoke the piece 
that ' that play of Kyng Richard ' was ' so old and so long 
out of use as that they should have small or no company 
at it.' None the less the performance took place on 
Saturday, February 7, 1 600-1, the day preceding the 
one fixed by Essex for his rising in the streets of London. 

for more then four myles space, crying and sajdng, God blesse your 
Lordship, God preserue your honour, &c., and some followed him untill 
the evening, onely to behold him.' 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 255 

The Queen, in a later conversation (on August 4, 1601) 
with WilHam Lambarde, a well-known antiquary, com- 
plained rather wildly that 'this tragedie' of 'Richard 
II,' which she had always viewed with suspicion, was 
played at the period with seditious intent 'forty times 
in open streets and houses.' ^ At any rate the players' 
appeal failed to provoke the response which the conspir- 
ators anticipated. On Sunday, February 8, Essex, with 
Southampton and others, fully armed, vainly appealed 
to the people of London to march on the Court. They 
addressed themselves to deaf ears, and being arrested by 
the Queen's troops were charged with high treason. At 
the joint trial of Essex and Southampton, the actor 
Phillips gave evidence of the circumstances in which the 
tragedy of ' Richard II ' was revived at the Globe theatre. 
Both Essex and Southampton were found guilty and 
sentenced to death. Essex was duly executed on Feb- 
ruary 25 within the precincts of the Tower of London; 
but Southampton was reprieved on the ground that his 
offence was due to his 'love' of Essex. He was impris- 
oned in the Tower of London until the Queen's death, 
more than two years later. No proceedings were taken 
against the players for their implied support of the 
traitors,^ but Shakespeare wisely abstained, for the 
time, from any public reference to the fate either of 
Essex or of his patron Southampton. 

Such incidents served to accentuate rather than injure 
Shakespeare's growing reputation. For several years 
his genius as dramatist and poet had been ac- shake- 
knowledged by critics and playgoers alike, and speare's 
his social and professional position had become and 
considerable. Inside the theatre his influence "lAuence. 
was supreme. When, in 1598, the manager of the 
company rejected Ben Jonson's first comedy — his 
'Every Man in his Humour' — Shakespeare intervened, 

^ Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth, iii. 552. 

2Cf. Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol. 
cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85; and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 
1598-1601, pp. 575-8. 



256 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

according to a credible tradition (reported by Rowe but 
denounced by Gifford), and procured a reversal of the 
decision in the interest of the unknown dramatist, who 
was his junior by nine years. Shakespeare took a part 
when the piece was performed. On September 22, 1598, 
after the production of the comedy, Jonson unluckily 
killed a fellow actor, Gabriel Spenser, in a duel in Moor- 
fields, and being convicted of murder escaped punish- 
ment by benefit of clergy. According to a story published 
at the time, he owed his release from 'purgatory' to a 
player, 'a charitable copperlaced Christian,' and his 
benefactor has been identified with Shakespeare.^ What- 
ever may have been Shakespeare's specific acts of benevo- 
lence, Jonson was of a difficult and jealous temper, and 
subsequently he gave vent to an occasional expression 
of scorn at Shakespeare's expense. But, despite passing 
manifestations of his unconquerable surliness, the proofs 
are complete that Jonson cherished genuine esteem and 
affection for Shakespeare till death.^ Within a very 
few years of Shakespeare's death Sir Nicholas L'Es- 
trange, an industrious collector of anecdotes, put into 
writing an anecdote for which he made John Donne, the 
poetic Dean of St. Paul's, responsible, attesting the 
amicable social relations that commonly subsisted be- 
tween Shakespeare and Jonson. 'Shakespeare,' ran 
the story, 'was godfather to one of Ben Jonson's children, 
and after the christening, being in a deep study, Jonson 
came to cheer him up and asked him why- he was so 
melancholy. "No, faith, Ben," says he, "not I, but I 
have been considering a great while what should be the 

^ See Dekker's Satiromastix, which was produced by Shakespeare's 
company in the autumn of 1601, where Horace, a caricature portrait of 
Ben Jonson, is thus addressed: 'Thou art the true arraign'd Poet, and 
shouldst have been hang'd, but for one of these part-takers, these chari- 
table Copper-lac'd Christians that fetcht thee out of Purgatory, Players 
I meane, Theaterians, pouchmouth stage- walkers ' (act iv. sc. iii. 252 
seq.). 

^ Cf . Gilchrist, Examination of the charges . . . of Jonson's Enmity 
towards Shakespeare, 1808. See Ben Jonson's elegy in the First Folio 
and his other references to Shakespeare's writings at p. 587 infra. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 257 

fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I 
have resolv'd at last." "I pr'ythee, what?" sayes he. 
"I' faith, Ben, I'll e'en give him a dozen good Lattin 
spoons, and thou shalt translate them."' ^ The friendly 
irony is in the gentle vein with which Shakespeare was 
traditionally credited. Very mildly is Ben Jonson re- 
buked for his vainglorious assertion of classical learning, 
the comparative lack of which in Shakespeare was a 
frequent theme of Jonson's taunts. 

The creator of Falstaff could have been no stranger 
to tavern life, and he doubtless took part with zest in the 
convivialities of men of letters. Supper parties rpj^^ 
at City inns were a welcome experience of all Mermaid 
poets and dramatists of the time. The bright "^^^ ^^^^" 
wit flashed freely amid the substantial fare of meat, 
game, pastry, cheese and fruit, with condiments of olives, 
capers and lemons, and flowing cups of 'rich Canary 
wine.' ^ The veteran ' Mermaid ' in Bread Street, Cheap- 
side, and the 'Devil' at Temple Bar, were celebrated 
early in the seventeenth century for their literary asso- 
ciations,^ while other taverns about the City, named 
respectively the 'Sun,' the 'Dog,' and the 'Triple 
Tun,' long boasted of their lettered patrons. The most 
famous of the literary hostelries in Shakespeare's era 
was the 'Mermaid,' where Sir Walter Raleigh was held 
to have inaugurated the poetic feasts. Through Shake- 
speare's middle years Ben Jonson exercised supreme 
control over the convivial life of literary London, and a 
reasonable tradition reports that Shakespeare was a 
frequent visitor to the 'Mermaid' tavern at the period 

^ ' Latten' is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in Merry Wives 
of Windsor [i. i. 165] likens Slender to a 'latten bilbo,' that is, a sword 
made of the mixed metal. Cf. Anecdotes and Traditions, edited from 
L'Estrange's MSS. by W. J. Thorns for the Camden Society, p. 2. 

2 Cf. Ben Jonson's Epigrams, No. ci. 'Inviting a Friend to Supper.' 

3 Cf. Herrick's Poems (Muses' Library, ii. no) where in his 'ode for' 
Ben Jonson, Herrick mentions : 

those lyric feasts 
Made at the Sun, 
The Dog, the Triple Tun. 



258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

when Ben Jonson presided over its parliament of wit. 
Of the intellectual brilliance of those 'merry' meetings 
the dramatist Francis Beaumont wrote glowingly in 
his poetical letter to the presiding genius : 

What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid ? heard words that have been 
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
As if that every one from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his duU Ufe.i 

'Many were the wit-combats,' wrote Fuller of Shake- 
speare in his 'Worthies' (1662), 'betwixt him and Ben 
Jonson, which two I behold Hke a Spanish great galleon 
and an English man of war; Master Jonson (like the 
former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in 
his performances. Shakespear, with the Englishman of 
war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in saiHng, could turn with 
all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by 
the quickness of his wit and invention.' 

Of the many testimonies paid to Shakespeare's reputa- 
tion as both poet and dramatist at this period of his 
Meres's Career, the most striking was that of Francis 
eulogy, Meres. Meres was a learned graduate of 
^^^^" Cambridge University, a divine and school- 

master, who brought out in 1598 a collection of apoph- 
thegms on morals, reHgion, and hterature which he 
entitled 'Palladis Tamia' or 'Wits Treasury.' In the 
volume he interpolated 'A comparative discourse of 
our EngHsh poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian 
poets,' and there exhaustively surveyed contemporary 
literary effort in England. Shakespeare figured in 
Meres's pages as the greatest man of letters of the day. 
'The Muses would speak Shakespeare's fine filed phrase,' 
Meres asserted, 'if they could speak EngHsh.' 'Among 
the English,' he declared, 'he is the most excellent in 

^ Francis Beaumont's Poems in Old Dramatists (Beaumont and 
Fletcher), ii. 708. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 259 

both kinds for the stage' {i.e. tragedy and comedy), 
rivalling the fame of Seneca in the one kind, and of 
Plautus in the other. There follow the titles of six 
comedies: 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'Errors,' 
'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'Love's Labour's Won' {i.e. 
'All's Weir), 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and 'Mer- 
chant of Venice,' and of six tragedies, 'Richard II,' 
'Richard III,' 'Henry IV,' 'King John,' 'Titus,' and 
'Romeo and Juliet.' Mention was also made of Shake- 
speare's 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' and his 
'sugred ^ sonnets among his private friends.' 

Shakespeare's poems 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lu- 
crece' received in contemporary literature of the closing 
years of Queen Ehzabeth's reign more fre- ^^^ 
quent commendation than his plays. Yet ing 'wor- 
' Romeo and Juliet,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' f^^^°} 
and 'Richard III' all received some approving speareas 
notice at critical hands ; and familiar references "^^""^ '^ * 
to Justice Silence, Justice Shallow, and Sir John Falstaff , 
with echoes of Shakespearean phraseology, either in 
printed plays or in contemporary private correspondence, 
attest the spreading range of Shakespeare's conquests.^ 
At the turn of the century the ' Pilgrimage to Parnassus, 
and the two parts of the 'Returne from Parnassus,' a tri- 

^ This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the. 
date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters 
of Shakespeare as Adonis, Venus, Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III 
with 'sugred tongues' in his Epigrams of 1599. In the Return from Par- 
nassus (1601?) Shakespeare is apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shake- 
speare.' Milton did homage to the tradition by writing of 'sweetest 
Shakespeare' in U Allegro. 

^ See Centurie of Praise, under the years 1600 and 1601. In Ben Jon- 
son's Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) one character is described 
as 'a kinsman of Justice Silence,' and of another it is foretold that he 
might become 'as fat as Sir John Falstaff.' A country gentleman. Sir 
Charles Percy, writing to a friend in London from his country seat in 
Gloucestershire, said : ' If I stay heere long in this fashion, at my return 
I think you will find mee so dull that I shall bee taken for Justice Silence 
or Justice Shallow . . . Perhaps thee will not exempt mee firom the 
opinion of a Justice Shallow at London, yet I will assure you, thee will 
make mee passe for a very sufficient gentleman in Gloucestershire' (MS. 
letter in Public Record Ofi&ce, Domestic State Papers, vol. 275, No. 146). 



26o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

logy of plays by wits of Cambridge University, introduce 
a student who constantly quotes 'pure Shakespeare and 
shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theatres.' 
The admirer asserts that he will hang a picture of ' sweet 
Mr. Shakespeare ' in his study, and denounces as ' dunci- 
fied' the world which sets Spenser and Chaucer above 
his idol. 

Shakespeare's assured reputation is convincingly cor- 
roborated by the value which unprincipled publishers 
„ , ,. , , attached to his name and by the zeal with 

Publishers i . i i ^ ri- i • 

unprin- which they sought to palm off on their cus- 
of^shake-^ tomcrs the productions of inferior pens as his 
speare's work. The practice began in 1594 and con- 
°^™^' tinned not only through the rest of Shake- 

speare's career, but for some half-century after his 
death. The crude deception was not wholly unsuccess- 
ful. Six valueless pieces which publishers put to his 
credit in his Hfetime found for a time unimpeded ad- 
mission to his collected works. 

As early as July 20, 1594, Thomas Creede, the printer 
of the surreptitious editions of ' Henry V ' and the ' Merry 

Wives' as well as of the more or less authentic 
ascriptions vcrsious of ' Richard III' (1598) and 'Romeo 
Sedme ^^^ Juliet' (1599) obtained a Kcense for the 

issue of the crude 'Tragedie of Locrine' which 
he published during 1595 as 'newly set foorth overseene 
and corrected. By W. S.' 'Locrine,' which lamely 
dramatises a Brito-Trojan legend from Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth's history, appropriated many passages from an 
older piece called 'Selimus,' which was also printed and 
pubHshed by Thomas Creede in 1594. 'Selimus' was 
no doubt from the pen of Robert Greene, and came into 
being long before Shakespeare was out of his apprentice- 
ship. Scenes of dumb show which preface each act of 
'Locrine' indicate the obsolete mould in which the piece 
was cast. The same initials — 'W. S.' ^ — figured on 

^ A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing for the 
theatrical manager Philip Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603, thirteen 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 26 1 

the title-page of ' The True Chronicle Historie of Thomas, 
Lord Cromwell . . . Written by W. S./ which was 
licensed on August 11, 1602, was printed for William 
Jones in that year, and was reprinted verbatim by 
Thomas Snodham in 16 13. The piece is described as 
having been acted by Shakespeare's company, both 
when under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain 
and under that of King James. 'Lord Cromwell' is a 
helpless collection of disjointed scenes from the 
biography of King Henry VIII's ministers ; it is quite 
destitute of literary quahty. On the title-page of a 
comedy entitled ' The Puritaine, or the Widdow of 
Watling Streete,' which George Eld printed in 1607, 
'W. S.' was for a third time stated to be the author. 
'The Puritaine . . . Written by W. S.' is a brisk farce 
portraying the coarseness of bourgeois London life in a 
manner which Ben Jonson essayed later in his 'Bartholo- 
mew Fair.' According to the title-page, the piece was 
'acted by the children of Paules' who never interpreted 
any of Shakespeare's works. 

Through the same period Shakespeare's full name 
appeared on the title-pages of three other pieces which 
are equally destitute of any touch of Shakespeare's 
hand, viz.: 'The First Part of the Life of Sir John 
Oldcastle' in 1600 (printed for T[homas] P[avier]), 
'The London Prodigal!' in 1605 (printed by T[homas] 
C[reede] for Nathaniel Butter), and 'A Yorkshire 
Tragedy' in 1608 (by R. B. for Thomas Pavier). 
The first part of the 'Life of Sir John Oldcastle' 
was the piece designed by other pens in 1599 to re- 
lieve the hero's character of the imputations which 

plays, none of which are extant. The Hector of Germanie, an extant 
play 'made by W. Smith' and published 'with new additions' in 1615, 
was doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic work by 
him that has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms 
the theory that the above.-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly 
claimed for Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use 
of the initials 'W. S.' was not due to the publishers' belief that Went- 
worth Smith was the author, but to their endeavour to delude their 
customers into a belief that the plays were by Shakespeare. 



262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare was supposed to cast upon it in his first 
sketch of Falstaff's portrait.^ 'The London Prodigall,' 
which was acted by Shakespeare's company, humorously 
delineates middle-class society after the manner of 
,^ 'The Puritaine.' 'A Yorkshire Tragedy,' 

Yorkshire which was acted by his Majesty's players 
rrage y. ^^ ^j^^ Globe, was assigned to Shakespeare 
not only on the title-page of the published book, but 
on the license granted to Thomas Pavier, the pirate 
publisher, by the Stationers' Company (May 2, 1608).^ 
The title-page describes the piece, which was unusually 
short, as 'not so new as lamentable and true'; it dra- 
matises current reports of the sensational murder in 
1605 by a Yorkshire squire of his children and of the 
attempted murder of his wife.^ 

None of the six plays just enumerated, which passed 
in Shakespeare's lifetime under either his name or his 
initials, has any reasonable pretension to Shakespeare's 
authorship ; nevertheless all were uncritically included in 
the Third Folio of his collected works (1664), and they 
reappeared in the Fourth Folio of 1685. Save in the 
case of 'A Yorkshire Tragedy,' criticism is unanimous in 
decreeing their exclusion from the Shakespearean canon. 
Nor does serious value attach to the grounds which led 
Schlegel and a few critics of repute to detect signs of 
Shakespeare's hand in ' A Yorkshire Tragedy.' However 
superior that drama is to its companions in passionate and 
lurid force, it is no more than ' a coarse, crude, and vigor- 
ous impromptu' which is as clearly as the rest by a far 
less experienced pen than Shakespeare's. 

The fraudulent practice of crediting Shakespeare 
with valueless plays from the pens of comparatively dull- 
witted contemporaries extended far beyond the six 
pieces which he saw circulating under his name, and 

■'• See p. 244 n. supra. 

^ Arber's Stationers' Reg. iii. 377. 

^ The piece was designed as one of a set of four plays, and it has the 
alternative title : ' All's one or One of the four plaies in one.' A second 
edition of 16 19 repeats the attribution to Shakespeare. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 263 

which the later Folios accepted as his. The worthless 
old play on the subject of King John was attributed to 
Shakespeare in the reissues of 161 1 and 1622, 
and enterprising traders continued to add to ascriptions 
the illegitimate record through the next gen- ^^^^"1^^^ 
eration. Humphrey Moseley, a London pub- 
Hsher of literary proclivities, who, between 1630 and 
his death early in 1661, issued much poetic literature, 
including the first collection of Milton's Minor Poems in 
1645, claimed for Shakespeare the authorship in whole 
or in part of as many as seven additional plays. On 
September g, 1653, he obtained from the Stationers' 
Company license to publish no less than forty-one 
'severall Playes.' The list includes 'The Merry Devill 
of Edmonton' which the publisher assigned wholly to 
Shakespeare; 'The History of Carden[n]io,' which was 
said to be a joint work of Shakespeare and Fletcher ; 
and two pieces called 'Henry I' and 'Henry H,' respon- 
sibility for which was divided between Shakespeare and 
a minor dramatist called Robert Davenport. On June 
29, 1660, Moseley repeated his bold exploit,^ and ob- 
tained a second hcense to publish twenty-eight further 
plays, three of which he again put without any warrant 
to Shakespeare's credit. The titles of this trio ran : 
'The History of King Stephen,' 'Duke Humphrey, a 
tragedy,' and 'Iphis and lantha, or a marriage without 
a man, a comedy.' Of the seven reputed Shakespearean 
dramas which appear on Moseley's lists, only one, ' The 
Merry Devill of Edmonton,' is extant. Pieces called 
the ' History of Cardenio ' ^ and ' Henry the First ' were 
acted by Shakespeare's company. Manuscripts of three 
other of Moseley's alleged Shakespearean plays ('Henry 
the First,' 'Duke Humphrey,' and 'The History of 
King Stephen ') would seem to have belonged in the 

^ Moseley's lists are carefully printed from the Stationers' Company's 
Registers in Mr. W. W. Greg's article 'The Bakings of Betsy' in The 
Library, July 191 1, pp. 237 seq. 

* See p. 438 infra. 



264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

early part of the eighteenth century to the antiquary 
and herald John Warburton, whose cook, traditionally 
christened Betsy Baker, through his 'carelessness' and 
her 'ignorance' committed them and many papers of a 
like kind to the kitchen flames.^ ' The Merry Devill of 
Edmonton,' the sole survival of Moseley's alleged 
< jjjg Shakespearean discoveries, was produced on the 

Merry stage before the close of the sixteenth century ; 
Edmou^ it was entered on the 'Stationers' Register' 
to^i' on October 22, 1607, was first published 

anonymously in 1608, 'as it hath beene sundry times 
Acted, by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the 
bankside,' and was revived before the Court at White- 
hall in May 16 13. There was a sixth quarto edition in 
1655. None of the early impressions bore an author's 
name. Francis Kirkman, another prominent London 
bookseller of Moseley's temper, assigned it to Shake- 
speare in his catalogue of 1661 ; a copy of it was bound 
up in Charles II's library with two other Elizabethan 
plays — ' Faire Em ' and ' Mucedorus ' — and the volume 
was labelled by the binders 'Shakespeare, volume i.'^ 
'The Merry Devill' is a delightful comedy, abounding 
in both humour and romantic sentiment; at times it 
recalls scenes of the ' Merry Wives of Windsor.' Superior 
as it is at all points to any other of Shakespeare's falsely 

1 Warburton's list of some fifty-six plays, all but three or four of 
which he charges his servant with destroying, is in the British Museum, 
Lansdowne MS. vol. 807, a volume which also contains the MS. of three 
pieces and the fragment of a fourth, the sole relics of the servant's holo- 
caust. The list is printed in Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 468- 
470, and more carefully by Mr. Greg in The Library, July 191 1, pp. 230-2. 
Among the pieces named are Henry I by Will. Shakespear and Robert 
Davenport; Duke Humphrey, by Will. Shakespear; and A Play by 
Will. Shakespeare vaguely identified with 'The History of King Stephen.' 
Sir Henry Herbert licensed The History of Henry the First to the King's 
company on April 10, 1624, attributing it to Davenport alone (Malone, 
iii. 229). Nothing else is known of Warburton's two other alleged 
Shakespearean pieces. 

2 This volume, which was at one time in the library of the actor 
Garrick, passed to the British Museum. Its contents are now bound up 
separately, the old label being long since discarded. (Cf. Malone's 
Variorum, 1821, ii. 682; Simpson's School of Shakspere, ii. 337.) 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 265 

reputed plays, it gives no sign of Shakespeare's workman- 
ship.^ The bookseller, Francis Kirkman, showed greater 
rashness in issuing in 1662 a hitherto unprinted piece 
called 'The Birth of Merlin,' an extravagant romance 
which he described on the title-page as 'written by 
WiUiam Shakespeare and William Rowley.' A few 
snatches of poetry fail to lift this piece above the crude 
level of Rowley's unaided work. It cannot be safely 
dated earlier than 1622, six years after Shakespeare's 
death. ^ 

Bold speculators have occasionally sought to justify 
the rashness of Charles II's bookbinder in labelling as 
Shakespeare's work the two pieces 'Mucedorus' and 
'Faire Em' along with the 'Merry DevilL' The book- 
seller Kirkman accepted the attribution in his ' Catalogue 
of Plays' of 1 67 1, and his fallacious guidance was followed 
by William Winstanley (1687) and Gerard Langbaine 
(1691) in their notices of Shakespeare in their respective 
'Lives of English Poets.' ^ 

'Mucedorus' is an elementary effort in romantic 
comedy somewhat in Greene's vein. It is interspersed 
with clownish horseplay and dates from the 'Muce- 
early years of Elizabeth's reign ; it was first dorus.' 
published in 1598 after having been 'sundrie times plaid 
in the honorable Cittie of London.' Its prolonged 
popularity is attested by the unparalleled number of 
sixteen quarto editions through which it passed in the 

^ The authorship cannot be positively determined. Coxeter, an 
eighteenth-century antiquary, assigned it to Michael Drayton. Charles 
Lamb and others, more probably, put it to Thomas Heywood's credit. 

^ A useful edition of fourteen ' doubtful ' plays, competently edited 
by Mr. C. F. Tucker Brooke under the general title of 'The Shakespeare 
Apocrypha,' was published by the Clarendon Press in iqo8. Mr. A. F. 
Hopkinson edited in three volumes (189 1-4) twelve doubtful plays and 
published a useful series of Essays on Shakespeare's doubtful plays (1900). 
Five of the apocryphal pieces, Faire Em, Merry Devill, Edward III, Mer- 
lin, Arden of Feversham, were edited by Karl Warnke and Ludwig 
Proescholdt (Halle, 1883-8). 

^ Kirkman also put to Shakespeare's credit in his Catalogue of 1671, 
Peek's Arraignment of Paris, another foolish blunder which Winstanley 
and Langbaine adopt. 



266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

seventeenth century. According to the title-page of the 
third quarto of 1610, the piece was acted at Court on 
Shrove Sunday night by Shakespeare's company, 'His 
highnes servants usually playing at the Globe,' and the 
text was then 'amplified with new additions.' These 
'additions' exhibit a dramatic ability above that of the 
dull level of the rest, and were presumably made after 
the comedy had come under the control of Shakespeare's 
associates. The new passages have deluded one modern 
critic into a justification of the seventeenth-century 
association of Shakespeare's name with the piece. Mr. 
Payne Collier, who included ' Mucedorus ' in his privately 
printed edition of Shakespeare in 1878, was confident 
that one of the scenes (rv. i.) interpolated in the 1610 
version — that in which the King of Valentia laments 
the supposed loss of his son — ■ displayed genius which 
Shakespeare alone could compass. However readily 
critics may admit the superiority in literary value of 
the additional scene to anything else in the piece, none 
can seriously accept Mr. Collier's extravagant estimate. 
The scene was probably from the pen of an admiring 
but faltering imitator of Shakespeare.^ 

'Faire Em,' although it was first printed at an un- 
certain date early in the seventeenth century and again 
'Faire in 1 63 1, was, according to the title-page of 
E™' both editions, acted by Shakespeare's com- 

pany while Lord Strange was its patron (1589-93). 
Two lines from the piece (v. 121 and 157) are, how- 
ever, quoted and turned to ridicule by Shakespeare's foe, 
Robert Greene, in his 'Farewell to Folly,' a mawkish 
penitential tract, with an appendix of short stories, 
which was licensed for publication in 1587, although no 
edition is known of earlier date than 1591. 'Faire Em' 
must therefore have been in circulation before Shake- 
speare's career as dramatist opened. . It is a very rudi- 
mentary endeavour in romantic comedy, in which two 

1 Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha, 1908, pp. vii, xxiii seq., 
103 seq. ; Dodsley's Old Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, vii. 236-8. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 267 

complicated tales of amorous adventure run independent 
courses ; the one tale has for its hero William the Con- 
queror, and the other has for heroine the fictitious Faire 
Em, daughter of one Sir Thomas Goddard who dis- 
guises himself for purposes of intrigue as a miller of 
Manchester. The piece has not even the pretension 
of 'Mucedorus' to one short scene of conspicuous liter- 
ary merit.^ 

Poems no less than plays, in which Shakespeare had 
no hand, were deceptively placed to his credit as soon 
as his fame was established. In 1599 William ,.pj^g 
Jaggard, a none too scrupulous publisher, Passionate 
issued a small poetic anthology which he en- ^*^s""^- 
titled 'The Passionate Pilgrim, by W. Shakespeare.' 
The volume, of which only two copies are known to be 
extant, consists of twenty lyrical pieces, the last six of 
which are introduced by the separate title-page : ' Son- 
nets to sundry notes of Musicke.' ^ Only five of the 
twenty poems can be placed to Shakespeare's credit. 
Jaggard's volume opened with two sonnets by Shake- 
speare which were not previously in print (Nos. cxxxviii. 
and cxliv. in the Sonnets of 1609), and there were 
scattered through the remaining pages three poems 
drawn from the already published play of 'Love's 
Labour's Lost.' The rest of the fifteen pieces were by 
Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, and even less 
prominent versifiers, not all of whom can be identified.^ 

^ Richard Simpson, in his School of Shakspere (1878, iii. 339 seq.), 
fantastically argues that the piece is by Shakespeare, and that it presents 
the leading authors and actors under false names, the main object being 
to satirise Robert Greene. Fleay thinks Robert Wilson, who was both 
actor and dramatist, was the author. 

^ The word 'sonnet' is here used in the sense of 'song.' No 'quator- 
zain ' is included in the last part of the Passionate Pilgrim. No notes of 
music were supplied to the volume ; but in the case of the poems ' Live 
with me and be my love ' and ' My flocks feed not ' contemporary airs are 
found elsewhere. 

^ The five pieces by Shakespeare are placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. 
xvi. Of the remainder, two-^ ' If music and sweet poetry agree ' (No. 
viii.) and ' As it fell upon a day ' (No. xx.) — were borrowed from Barn- 
field's Poems in diuers humors (1598). Four sonnets on the theme of 



268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

According to custom, many of the pieces were circulat- 
ing in dispersed manuscripts. The pubhsher had evil 
precedent for bringing together in a single volume de- 
tached poems by various pens and for attributing them 
all on the title-page to a single author who was responsi- 
ble for a very small number of them.^ 

Jaggard issued a second edition of 'The Passionate 
Pilgrim' in 1606, but no copy survives. A third edition 
The third appeared in 161 2 with an expanded title-page: 
edition. ' -pjig Passionate Pilgrime, or Certaine Amorous 
Sonnets betweene Venus and Adonis, newly corrected 
and augmented. By W. Shakespere. The third edi- 
tion. Whereunto is newly added two Loue-Epistles, 
the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellens answere back 
againe to Paris. Printed by W. Jaggard. 161 2.' The 
old text reappeared without change ; the words ' certain 
amorous sonnets between Venus and Adonis' appro- 
priately describe four non-Shakespearean poems in the 
original edition, and the fresh emphasis laid on them in 

Venus and Adonis (Nos. iv. vi. Lx. and xi.) are probably by Bartholo- 
mew Griffin, from whose Fidessa (1596) No. xi. is directly adapted. 
'My flocks feed not' (No. xvii.) comes from Thomas Weelkes's Mad- 
rigals (1597), but Barnfield is again pretty certainly the author. 
'Live with me and be my love' (No. xix.) is by Marlowe, and four lines 
are quoted by Sir Hugh Evans in Shakespeare's Merry Wives (iii. i. 17 
seq.). The appended stanza to Marlowe's lyric entitled 'Love's Answer' 
is by Sir Walter Ralegh. ' Crabbed age and youth cannot live together' 
(No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by Elizabethan dramatists. 
'It was a Lording's daughter' (No. xv.) is a ballad possibly by Thomas 
Deloney. Nos. vii. x. xiii. xiv. and xviii. are commonplace love poems 
in six-line stanzas of no individuality, the authorship of which is un- 
known. See for full discussion of the various questions arising out of 
Jaggard's volume the introduction to the facsimile of the 1599 edition 
(Oxford, 1905, 4to). 

^ See Bryton's Bowre of Delights, 1591, and Arhor of Amormis Deiiices 
. . ., by N. B. Gent, 1594 — two volumes of miscellaneous poems, all 
of which the publisher Richard Jones assigned to the poet Nicholas 
Breton, though the majority of them were by other writers. Breton 
plaintively protested that the earlier volume ' was done altogether with- 
out my consent or knowledge, and many things of other men mingled 
with a few of mine; for except Amoris Lachrimce, an epitaph upon Sir 
Philip Sidney, and one or two other toys, which I know not how he {i.e. 
the publisher) unhappily came by, I have no part of any of them.' (Pref- 
atory note to Breton's Pilgrimage to Paradise, 1592.) 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 269 

the new title-page had the intention of suggesting a con- 
nection with Shakespeare's first narrative poem. But 
the unabashed Jaggard added to the third edition of his 
pretended Shakespearean anthology, two new non- 
Shakespearean poems which he silently filched . from 
Thomas Heywood's 'Troia Britannica.' That work was 
a collection of poetry which Jaggard had published for 
Heywood in 1609. Heywood called attention to his 
personal grievance in the dedicatory epistle before his 
'Apology for Actors' (161 2) which was addressed to a 
rival pubHsher Nicolas Okes, and he added the important 
information that Shakespeare resented the more sub- 
stantial injury which the publisher had done him. Hey- 
wood's words run : ' Here, likewise, I must necessarily 
insert a manifest injury done me in that work [i.e. 
'Troia Britannica' of 1609] by taking the two epistles 
or Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing' them 
in a less volume [i.e. 'The Passionate Pilgrim' of 161 2] 
under the name of another [i.e. Shakespeare], which may 
put the world in opinion I might steal them from him, 
and he to do himself right, hath since published them in 
his own name : but as I must acknowledge my -pj^^j^g^g 
lines not worth his [i.e. Shakespeare's] patronage Heywood's 
under whom he [i.e. Jaggard] hath published sha^te-^'^ 
them, so the author, I know, much offended speare's 
with M. Jaggard that altogether unknown to '^^^^' 
him presumed to make so bold with his name.' In the 
result the pubHsher seems to have removed Shake- 
speare's name from the title-page of a few copies.^ 
Heywood's words form the sole recorded protest on 
Shakespeare's part against the many injuries which he 
suffered at the hands of contemporary publishers. 
In 1 60 1 Shakespeare's full name was attached to 'a 

^ Only two copies of the third edition of the Passionate Pilgrim are 
extant ; one formerly belonging to Mr. J. E. T. Loveday of Williamscote 
near Banbury, was sold by him to an American collection in 1906; the 
other is in the Malone collection at the Bodleian. The Malone copy 
has two title-pages, from one of which Shakespeare's name is omitted. 
The Loveday copy has the title-page bearing Shakespeare's name. 



270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



poetical essaie on the Phoenix and the Turtle,' which was 
published by Edward Blount, a prosperous 
Phcenix London stationer of literary tastes, as part of a 
^'^l^^y supplement or appendix to a volume of verse 
by one Robert Chester. Chester's work bore 
the title : ' Love's Martyr, or Rosalin's complaint, alle- 
gorically shadowing the Truth of Love in the Constant 
Fate of the Phcenix and Turtle . . . [with] some new 
compositions of seueral moderne Writers whose names 
are subscribed to their seuerall workes.' Neither the 
drift of Chester's crabbed verse, nor the occasion of its 
composition is clear, nor can the praise of perspicuity be 
allowed to the supplement, to which Shakespeare con- 
tributed. His colleagues there are the dramatic poets, 
John Marston, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and two 
writers signing themselves respectively 'Vatum Chorus' 
and 'Ignoto.' The supplement is introduced by an 
independent title-page running thus : ' Hereafter follow 
diverse poeticall Essaies on the former subject, viz. : 
the Turtle and Phoenix. Done by the best and chiefest 
of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to 
their particular workes : never before extant ; and (now 
first) consecreated by them all generally to the love and 
merite of the true-noble knight, Sir John SaHsburie.' 
Sir John Salisbury was also the patron to whom Robert 
Chester, the author of the main work, modestly dedi- 
cated his labours. 

Sir John Sahsbury, a Welsh country gentleman of 
Lleweni, Denbighshire, who was by two years Shake- 
speare's junior, married in early life Ursula 
Salisbury's Stanley, an illegitimate daughter of the fourth 
patronage ^g,Yl of Derby, who was at one time patron of 

01 DOCtS 

Shakespeare's theatrical company.^ Sir John 
was appointed an esquire of the body to Queen Elizabeth 
in 1595, and spent much time in London during the 

1 Sir John's surname is usually spelt Sabtsbury. Dr. Johnson's friend, 
Mrs. Thrale (afterwards Mrs. Piozzi), whose maiden name was Salus- 
bury, was a direct descendant. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 271 

rest of the reign, being knighted in 160 1. A man of 
literary culture, he could turn a stanza with some deft- 
ness, and was a generous patron of many Welsh and 
English bards who wrote much in honour of himself 
and his family. Robert Chester was clearly a con- 
fidential protege closely associated with the knight's 
Welsh home. But it is clear that Sir John was 
acquainted with Ben Jonson and other men of letters 
in the capital and that Shakespeare and the rest good- 
naturedly contributed to Chester's volume by way of 
showing regard for a minor Maecenas of the day. 

Chester's own work is a confused collection of grotesque 
allegorical fancies which is interrupted by an elaborate 
metrical biography of King Arthur.^ The Robert 
writer would seem to celebrate in obscure and Chester's 
figurative phraseology the passionate love of ^^ ' 
Sir John for his wife and its mystical reinforcement on 
the occasion of the birth of their first child. 

Some years appear to have elapsed between the com- 
position of Chester's verses and their publication, and the 
friendly pens who were responsible for the supplement 
embroidered on Chester's fantasy fresh conceits, which, 
while they were of vague relevance to his symbolic inten- 
tion, were designed to conciliate his master's favour. 
The contributor who conceals his identity under the 
pseudonym 'Vatum Chorus,' and signs the opening lines 
of the supplement, greeted ' the worthily honoured knight. 
Sir John Salusbury,' as 'an honourable friend,' whose 
merits were 'parents to our several rhymes.' All the 
contributors play enigmatic voluntaries on the famihar 
mythology of the phoenix, the unique bird of Arabia, and 
the turtle-dove, the symbol of loving constancy, whose 

^ By way of enhancing the mystification, the title-page describes the 
main work as ' now first translated [by Robert Chester] out of the Vener- 
able Italian Torquato Coeliano.' No Italian poet of this name is known, 
the designation seems a fantastic amalgam of the Christian name (Tor- 
quato) of Tasso and the surname of a contemporary Italian poetaster, 
Livio Celiano. Chester described his interpolated ' true legend of famous 
King Arthur' as 'the first essay of a new Brytish Poet collected out of 
diverse Authentical Records.' 



272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

mystical union was Chester's recondite theme. Like 
Chester they make the phoenix feminine and the turtle- 
dove masculine, and their general aim is the glorification 
of a perfect example of spiritual love. Shakespeare's 
'poetical essaie' consists of thirteen four-lined stanzas 
in trochaics, each line being of seven syllables, with the 
rhymes disposed as in Tennyson's 'In Memoriam.' The 
concluding 'threnos' is in five three-lined stanzas, also 
in trochaics, each stanza having a single rhyme. ^ Both 
in tone and metre Shakespeare's verses differ from their 
companions. They strike unmistakably an elegiac or 
funereal note which is out of keeping with their environ- 
ment. The dramatist cryptically describes the obse- 
quies, which other birds attended, of the phoenix and 
the turtle-dove, after they had been knit together in 
life by spiritual ties and left no offspring. Chaucer's 
'Parliament of Foules' and the abstruse symbolism of 
sixteenth-century emblem books are thought to be 
echoed in Shakespeare's lines; but their closest affinity 
seems to lie with the imagery of MattheW Roydon's 
elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, where the turtle-dove and 
phoenix meet the swan and eagle at the dead hero's 
funeral, and there play roles somewhat similar to those 
which Shakespeare assigns the birds in his 'poeticall 
essaie.' ^ The internal evidence scarcely justifies the 
conclusion that Shakespeare's poem, which is an exer- 
cise in allegorical elegy in untried metre, was penned 
Shake- ^^^ Chester's book. It must have been either 
speareand deviscd in an idle hour with merely abstract 
contribu^ intention, or it was suggested by the death 
tors. within the poet's own circle of a pair of 

devoted lovers. The resemblances with the verses 
of Chester and his other coadjutors are specious 
and superficial and Shakespeare's piece would seem 

^ Shakespeare's concluding ' Threnos ' is imitated in metre and phrase- 
ology by Fletcher in his Mad Lover in the song 'The Lover's Legacy to his 
Cruel Mistress.' 

^ See Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Again (1595), ad fin. 



DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER 273 

to have been admitted to the miscellany at the solicita- 
tion of friends who were bent on paying as comprehen- 
sive a compliment as possible to Sir John Salisbury. 
The poem's publication in its curious setting is chiefly 
memorable for the evidence it offers of Shakespeare's 
amiable acquiescence in a fantastic scheme of profes- 
sional homage on the part of contemporary poets to a 
patron of promising repute.^ 

^ A unique copy of Chester's Love's Martyr is in Mr. Christie-Miller's 
library at Britwell. Of a reissue of the original edition in 161 1 with a 
new title, The Annals of Great Brittaine, a copy (also unique) is in the 
British Museum. A reprint of the original edition was prepared for 
private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in his series of 'Occasional 
Issues.' It was also printed in the same year as one of the publications 
of the New Shakspere Society. Dr. A. H. R. Fairchild, in 'The Phoenix 
and Turtle : a critical and historical interpretation ' {Englische Studien, 
1904, vol. xxxiii. pp. 337 seq.), examines the poem in the light of mediaeval 
conceptions of love and of the fantastic allegorical imagery of the em- 
blematists. A more direct light is thrown on the history of Chester's 
volume and incidentally of Shakespeare's contribution to it in Mr. Carle- 
ton Brown's 'Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester' {Bryn 
Mawr College Monographs, vol. xiv. 1913). Mr. Brown prints many 
poems by Sir John, by Robert Chester, and by other of Sir John's pro- 
teges, from MSS. at Christ Church, Oxford (formerly the property of 
Sir John Salisbury). These MSS. include an autograph poem of Ben 
Jonson. Mr. Brown has also laid under contribution a very rare pub- 
lished volume, Robert Parry's Sinetes (1597), which was dedicated to Sir 
John, and contains much verse by the patron as well as by the poet. 
Furthermore Mr. Brown supplies from original sources an exhaustive 
biography of Sir John and confutes Dr. Grosart's erroneous identifica- 
tion of the poet Robert Chester, whose Welsh connections are plainly 
indicated in his verse, with a country gentleman (of the same names) of 
Royston, Hertfordshire. No student of Chester's volume can afford to 
overlook Mr. Brown's valuable researches. 



XIV 

THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 

In London Shakespeare resided as a rule near the play- 
houses. Soon after his arrival he found a home in the 
P^^is^ ^^ St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, within 
speare's casy reach of 'The Theatre' in Shoreditch. 
residences There he remained until i sq6. In the autumn 

in London. . -'-' 

of that year he migrated across the ihames 
to the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, where actors, 
dramatic authors, and public entertainers generally were 
already congregating.^ 

Meanwhile Shakespeare's name was placed on the roll 
of 'subsidy men' or taxpayers for St. Helen's parish, 
His fiscal and his personal property there was valued 
obligation. fQj- fiscal purposes at 5/. In 1593 Parliament 
had voted to the Crown three subsidies, and each sub- 
sidy involved a payment of 2s. Sd. in the pound on 
the personal assessment. Shakespeare thus became 
liable for an aggregate sum of 2I. — 13.S. 4d. for each of 
the three subsidies. But the collectors of taxes in the 
city of London worked sluggishly. For three years they 
put no pressure on the dramatist, and Shakespeare left 
Bishopsgate without discharging the debt. Soon after- 
wards, however, the Bishopsgate officials traced him 
to his new Southwark lodging. The Liberty of the 
Clink within which his new abode lay was an estate of 

^ A missing memorandum by AUeyn (quoted by Malone) , the general 
trustworthiness of which is attested by the fiscal records cited hifra, 
locates Shakespeare's Southwark residence in 1596 'near the Bear 
Garden.' The Bear Garden was a popular place of entertainment which 
was chiefly' devoted to the rough sports of bear- and bull-baiting. Near 
at hand in 1596 were the Rose and the Swan theatres — the earliest 
playhouses to be erected on the south side of the Thames. 

274 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 275 

the Bishop of Winchester, and was under the Bishop's 
exclusive jurisdiction. In October 1596 the revenue 
officer of St. Helen's obtained the permission of the 
Bishop's steward to claim the overdue tax of Shake- 
speare across the river. Next year the poet paid on 
account of the St. Helen's assessment a first instalment 
of ^s. A second instalment of 135. 4d. followed next year.^ 

There is little reason to doubt that Southwark, which 
formed the chief theatrical quarter through the later 
years of Shakespeare's life, remained a in South- 
customary place of residence so long as his ^^'^^■ 
work required his presence in the metropolis. From 
1599 onwards he was thoroughly identified with the 
fortunes of the Globe Theatre on the Bankside in South- 
wark, the leading playhouse of the epoch, and in adja- 
cent streets lodged Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, 
and many other actors, with whom his social relations 
were very close. His youngest brother, Edmund, who 
became a 'player,' was buried in St. Saviour's Church 
in Southwark on December 31, 1607, a proof that he 
at any rate was a resident in that parish. Shakespeare 
had close professional relations too with the contem- 
porary dramatist, John Fletcher, who, according to 
Aubrey, lived with his literary partner Francis Beau- 
mont, 'on the Banke-side (in Southwark) not far from 
the playhouse {i.e. the Globe).' 

But Shakespeare's association with South London 
during his busiest years did not altogether withdraw him 
from other parts of the city. Some of his colleagues at 
the Globe Theatre preferred a residence at some dis- 

^ Cf. Exchequer Lay Subsidies, City of London, 146/369, Public Record 
Office; Prof. J. W. Hales in AthencBwn, March 26, 1904. No docu- 
mentary evidence has yet been discovered of any other contribution by 
Shakespeare to the national taxes during any part of his career, either 
in Stratford or London. The surviving fiscal archives of the period 
have not yet been quite exhaustively searched. But it is clear that taxa- 
tion was levied at the period partially and irregularly, and that numer- 
ous persons of substance escaped the collectors' notice. See the present 
writer's 'Shakespeare and Public Affairs' in Fortnightly Review, Sept. 
1913- 



276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

tance from their place of work.^ The greatest actor of 
Shakespeare's company, Richard Burbage, would seem 
to have remained through life a resident in Shoreditch, 
where he served at 'The Theatre' his histrionic ap- 
prenticeship.^ Two other professional friends, John 
Heminges and Henry Condell, were for many years 
highly respected parishioners of St. Mary Aldermanbury 
near Cripplegate when Heminges served as churchwarden 
in 1608 and Condell ten years later. Visits to friends' 
houses from time to time called the dramatist from South- 
wark, and he made an occasional stay in the central dis- 
trict of the City where Heminges and Condell had their 
home. 

In the year 1604 Shakespeare 'laye in the house' 
of Christopher Montjoy, a Huguenot refugee, who carried 
Aiodgerin on the busiucss of a 'tiremaker' (i.e. maker 
Street °^ ladies' headdresses) in Silver Street, near 

1604. ' Wood Street, Cheapside.^ It is clear that for 

^ See the wills and other documents in Collier's Lives of the Actors. 

^ A theory that Shakespeare was, like the Burbages, remembered as 
a Shoreditch resident, rests on a shadowy foundation. Aubrey's bio- 
graphical jottings which are preserved in his confused autograph at the 
Bodleian contain some enigmatic words which seem to have been in- 
tended by the writer to apply to one of three persons — either to Shake- 
speare, to John Fletcher or to John Ogilby, a well-known dancing master 
of Aubrey's day. The incoherent arrangement of the page renders it 
impossible to determine the individual reference. The disjointed pas- 
sage runs : 'The more to be admired q. [i.e. quod or quia] he [i.e. Shake- 
speare, Fletcher, or Ogilby] was not a company keeper, lived in Shore- 
ditch, would not be debauched & if invited to writ; he was in paine.' 
The next line is blank save for 'W. Shakespeare' in the centre. The 
succeeding note states that one Mr. William Beeston possessed informa- 
tion about Shakespeare which he derived from the actor Mr. Lacy. Sir 
G. F. Warner inclines to the opinion that Shakespeare was intended in 
the obscure passage; Mr. Falconer Madan thinks Fletcher. If Shake- 
speare were intended the words would mean that he avoided social dis- 
sipation, that he resided in Shoreditch, and that the practice of writing 
caused him pain. None of these assertions have any coherence with 
better attested information. See E. K. Chambers, A Jotting by John 
Aubrey, in Malone Soc. Collections (1911), vol. i. pp. 324 seq. Mr. 
Andrew Clark in his edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives, 1898, vol. i. p. 97, 
wrongly makes the entry refer to the actor William Beeston. 

' Cf. Jonson's Silent Woman, iv. ii. 94-5 (Captain Otter of Mrs. 
Otter) : ' All her teeth were made i' the Black-Friers, both her eyebrowes 
i' the Strand, and her haire in Siluer-street.' 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 277 

some time before and after 1604 the dramatist was 
on familiar terms with the 'tiremaker' and with his 
family, and that he interested himself benevolently in 
their domestic affairs. One of Montjoy's near neighbours 
was Shakespeare's early Stratford friend Richard Field, 
the prosperous stationer, who after 1600 removed from 
Ludgate Hill, Blackfriars, to the sign of the Splayed 
Eagle in Wood Street. Field's wife was a Huguenot 
and the widow of a prominent member of the Huguenot 
community in London. Shakespeare may have owed 
a passing acquaintance with the Huguenot ' tiremaker ' 
to his fellow-townsman Field, and to Field's Huguenot 
connections.^ The sojourn un^er Montjoy's roof was 

^ The knowledge of Shakespeare's relations with Silver Street and 
with the Montjoy family is due to Dr. C. W. Wallace's recent researches 
at the Public Record Office. In Harper's Magazine, March 19 10, Dr. 
Wallace first cited or described a long series of legal documents connected 
with a lawsuit of 161 2 in the Court of Requests — Bellott v. Montjoy — in 
which Montjoy was the defendant and 'William Shakespeare of Strat- 
ford-on-Avon in the County of Warwick, gentleman, of the age of xlvii 
yeares or thereabouts' was a witness for the plaintiff, Stephen Bellott, 
Montjoy's son-in-law. The litigation arose out of the conditions of the 
marriage which took place on Nov. 19, 1604, between Mary Montjoy, 
daughter of Shakespeare's host in Silver Street, and Bellott, then her 
father's apprentice. Bellott's apprenticeship to Montjoy ran from 1598 
to 1604. To a witness, Mrs. Joan Johnson, formerly a female servant 
in Montjoy's employ, we owe the statement that 'one, Mr. Shakespeare, 
that laye in the house ' had helped at the instance of the girl's mother to 
persuade the apprentice — a reluctant wooer — to marry his master's 
daughter. Other witnesses state, partly on the authority of Shake- 
speare's communications to them, that Bellott consented to the marriage 
on condition that he received 50^. together with ' certain household stuff ' 
and the promise of a further sum of 200/. on Montjoy's death. It was 
to confirm this alleged contract which Montjoy repudiated that Bellott 
brought his action in 161 2. In the deposition which Shakespeare signed 
on May 11, 1612, he supports Bellott's allegations, adding that he knew 
the apprentice 'duringe the tyme' of his service with Montjoy; that 
it appeared to him that Montjoy did 'all the time' of Bellott's service 
'bear and show great good will and affection towards' him, and that he 
heard the defendant and his wife speak well of their apprentice at ' divers 
and sundry tymes.' The Court remitted the case to the Consistory of 
the French Huguenot Church in London, which decided in Bellott's 
favour. The numerous records in the case, which throw no precise light 
on the length or reasons of Shakespeare's stay in Silver Street, have been 
printed in exlenso by Dr. Wallace in University Studies, Nebraska, U.S.A. 
The autograph signature which Shakespeare appended to his deposition 
is reproduced on p. 519 infra. 



278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

unlikely in any case to have been more than a passing 
interlude in the dramatist's Southwark life. 

Shakespeare, in middle life, brought to practical 
affairs a singularly sane and sober temperament. In 
Shake- 'Ratseis Ghost' (1605), an anecdotal biography 
speare's of Gamaliel Ratsey, a notorious highwayman, 
tempera- who was hanged at Bedford on March 26, 1605, 
ment. i}^q highwayman is represented as compelling 

a troop of actors whom he met by chance on the road 
to perform in his presence. According to the memoir 
Ratsey rewarded the company with a gift of forty 
shillings, of which he robbed them next day. Before 
dismissing his victims Ratsey addressed himself to a 
leader of the company in somewhat mystifying terms. 
He would dare wager that if his auditor went to London 
and played 'Hamlet' there, he would outstrip the famous 
player, who was making his fame in that part. It v/as 
needful to practise the utmost frugality in the capital. 
'When thou feelest thy purse well lined (the counsellor 
proceeded, less ambiguously), buy thee some place or 
lordship in the country that, growing weary of playing, 
thy money may there bring thee to dignity and reputa- 
tion.' To this speech the player replied: 'Sir, I thanke 
you for this good counsell ; I promise you I will make use 
of it, for I have heard, indeede, of some that have gone to 
London very meanly, and have come in time to be ex- 
ceeding wealthy.' Finally the whimsical outlaw directed 
the player to kneel down and mockingly conferred on 
him the title of 'Sir Simon Two Shares and a Halfe.' 
Whether or no Ratsey's biographer consciously identified 
the highwayman's auditor with Shakespeare, it was the 
prosaic course of conduct which Ratsey recommended to 
his actor that Shakespeare literally followed. As soon 
as his position in his profession was assured, he de- 
voted his energies to re-establishing the fallen fortunes 
of his family in his native place and to acquiring for 
himself and his successors the status of gentlefolk. No 
sooner was Shakespeare's purse 'well lined,' than he 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 279 

bought 'some place or lordship in the country' which 
assured him 'dignity and reputation.' ^ 

His father's pecuniary embarrassments had steadily 
increased since his son's departure. Creditors harassed 
the elder Shakespeare unceasingly. In 1587 jjj^ 
one Nicholas Lane pursued him for a debt which father's 
he owed as surety for his impecunious brother " ^^ ^^^^' 
Henry, who. was still farming their father's lands at 
Snitterfield. Through 1588 and 1589 John Shakespeare 
retaliated with pertinacity on a debtor named John 
Tompson. But in 1591 a substantial creditor, Adrian 
Quiney, a ' mercer ' of repute, with whom and with whose 
family the dramatist was soon on intimate terms, ob- 
tained a writ of distraint against his father. Happily 
the elder Shakespeare never forfeited his neighbours' 
faith in his integrity. In 1592 he attested inventories 
taken on the death of two neighbours, of Ralph Shaw, a 
wooldriver, with whose prosperous son, Julius, Shake- 
speare was later in much personal intercourse, and of 
Henry Field, father of the London printer. None the 
.less the dramatist's father was on December 25 of the 
same year 'presented' as a recusant for absenting him- 
self from church. The commissioners reported that his 
absence was probably due to 'fear of process for debt.' 
He figures for the last time the proceedings of the local 
court, in his customary role of defendant, on March 9, 
1594-5. He was then joined with two fellow traders — 
Philip Green, a chandler, and Henry Rogers, a butcher 
— as defendant in a suit again brought by Adrian 

^ The only copy known of Ratseis Ghost (1605) is in the John Rylands 
Library, Manchester. The author doubtless had his eye on Burbage 
as well as on Shakespeare. 'Two and a half shares' formed at the out- 
set Burbage's precise holding in the first Globe Theatre, and would en- 
title him better than Shakespeare to be called 'Sir Simon Two Shares 
and a Half.' Ratsey's hearer is warned moreover that when he has 
made his fortune he need not care ' for them that before made thee 
proud with speaking their words upon the stage ' — phraseology which 
suggests that Ratsey was taking into account the actor's rather than 
the author's fortunes. On the other hand, Burbage is not known to 
have acquired, like Shakespeare, a 'place or lordship in the country.' 



28o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Quiney, but now in conjunction with one Thomas Barker, 
for the recovery of the large sum of five pounds. UnHke 
his partners in the Htigation, the elder Shakespeare's 
name is not followed in the record by a mention of his 
calling, and when the suit reached a later stage his name 
was omitted altogether. These may be viewed as 
indications that in the course of the proceedings he 
finally retired from trade, which had been of late prolific 
in disasters for him. In January 1596-7 he conveyed 
a slip of land attached to his dwelling in Henley Street 
to one George Badger, a Stratford draper.^ 

There is a likelihood that the poet's wife fared, in 
the poet's absence, no better than his father. The 
His wife's Only Contemporary mention made of her be- 
debt. tween her marriage in 1582 and the execution 

of her husband's will in the spring of 161 6 is as the 
borrower at an unascertained date (evidently before 
1595) of forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who 
had formerly been her father's shepherd. The money 
was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and he 
directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet 
and distribute it among the poor of Stratford.^ 

It was probably in 1596 that Shakespeare returned, 
after nearly eleven years' absence, to his native town, 
and very quickly did he work a revolution in the affairs of 
his family. The prosecutions of his father in the local 

^ Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 13. 

2 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186; J. W. Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage, 
1905, pp. 28-29. The pertinent clause in shepherd Whittington's will 
directs payment to be made 'unto the poor people of Stratford [of the 
sum of] xl^ that is in the hand of Anne Shaxspere wyffe unto Mr. Wyllyam 
Shaxspere, and is due debt to me. The sum is to be paid to mine exec- 
utor by the said Willyam Shaxspere or his assigns according to the true 
meanying of this my will.' Whittington's estate was valued at 50/. is. 
iid. The testator's debtors included, in addition to Mrs. Anne Shake- 
speare, John and William Hathaway, her brothers, who owed him an 
aggregate sum of 61. 2s. iid. Of this sum 3/. was an unpaid bequest 
made to him by Mrs. Joan Hathaway, Mrs. Shakespeare's mother, who 
having lately died had appointed her sons, John and William Hathaway, 
her executors. On the other side of the account, Whittington admitted 
that ' a quarter of a year's board ' was due from him to the two brothers 
Hathaway. 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 28 1 

court ceased. The poet's relations with Stratford were 
thenceforth uninterrupted. He still resided in London 
for most of the year ; but until the close of his ^^^^j^ ^^ 
professional career he paid the town at least his only 
one annual visit, and he was always formally ^°°' ^^^ ' 
described there and elsewhere as 'of Stratford-on-Avon, 
gentleman.' He was no doubt at Stratford on August 
II, 1596, when his only son, Hamnet, was buried in the 
parish church ; the boy was eleven and a half years old. 
Two daughters were now Shakespeare's only children — 
Hamnet's twin-sister Judith and the elder daughter 
Susanna, now a girl of thirteen. 

At the same date the poet's father, despite his pecuniary 
embarrassments, took a step, by way of regaining his 
prestige, which must be assigned to the poet's shake- 
intervention.^ He made application to the speare and 
College of Heralds for a coat-of-arms.^ Heral- Heralds' 
die ambitions were widespread among the College. 
middle classes of the day, and many Elizabethan actors 
besides Shakespeare sought heraldic distinction. The 
loose organisation of the Heralds' College favoured the 
popular predilection. Rumour ran that the College was 
ready to grant heraldic honours without strict inquiry 
to any applicant who could afford a substantial fee. In 
numerous cases the heralds clearly credited an appli- 
cant's family with a fictitious antiquity. Rarely can 
much reliance therefore be placed on the biographical or 
genealogical statements alleged in Elizabethan grants 
of arms. The poet's father, or the poet himself, when 

^ There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the 
poet's heraldry in Herald and Genealogist, i. 510. Facsimiles of all the 
documents preserved in the College of Arms are given in Miscellanea 
Genealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps prints 
imperfectly one of the 1596 draft-grants, and that of 1599 {Outlines, ii. 
56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the negotiation of the 
earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later year. 

^ It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an applicant 
for a coat-of-arms who has a father alive that the application should be 
made in the father's name, and the transaction conducted as if the 
father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind that 
Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below. 



282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

first applying to the College stated that John Shake- 
speare, in 1568, while he was bailiff of Stratford, and 
while he was by virtue of that office a justice of the 
peace, had obtained from Robert Cook, then Clarenceux 
herald, a 'pattern' or sketch of an armorial coat. This 
allegation is not confirmed by the records of the College, 
and may be an invention designed by John Shakespeare 
and his son to recommend their claim to the notice of the 
easy-going heralds in 1596. The negotiations of 1568, 
if they were not • apocryphal, were certainly abortive ; 
otherwise there would have been no necessity for the 
further action of the later years. In any case, on October 
20, 1596, a draft, which remains in the College of Arms, 
was prepared under the direction of William Dethick, 
Garter King-of-Arms, granting John's request for a coat- 
The draft of-arms. Garter stated, with characteristic 
'Coat' of vagueness, that he had been 'by credible re- 
^^^^" port' informed that the appHcant's ' parentes 

and late antecessors were for theire valeant and faith- 
full service advanced and rewarded by the most prudent 
prince King Henry the Seventh of famous memorie, 
sythence whiche tyme they have continewed at those 
partes [i.e. Warwickshire] in good reputacion and credit' ; 
and that 'the said John [had] maryed Mary, daughter 
and one of the heyres of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, 
gent.' In consideration of these titles to honour, 
Garter declared that he assigned to Shakespeare this 
shield, viz. : ' Gold on a bend sable, a spear of the first, 
the point steeled proper, and for his crest or cognizance 
a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a 
wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold steeled 
as aforesaid.' In the margin of this draft-grant there is 
a pen sketch of the arms and crest, and above them is 
written the motto, 'Non Sans Droict.' ^ A second copy 
of the draft, also dated in 1596, is extant at the College. 

^ In a manuscript in the British Museum {Had. MS. 6140, f. 45) is 
a copy of the tricking of the arms of William 'Shakspere,' which is 
described 'as a pattentt per Will'm Dethike Garter, Principall King of 
Armes'; this is figured in French's Shakes pear eana Genealogica, p. 524. 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 283 

The only alterations are the substitution of the word 
'grandfather' for 'antecessors' in the account of John 
Shakespeare's ancestry, and the substitution of the word 
'esquire' for 'gent' in the description of his wife's father, 
Robert Arden. At the foot of this draft, however, ap- 
peared some disconnected and unverifiable memoranda 
which had been supplied to the heralds, to the effect 
that John had been bailiff of Stratford, had received a 
'pattern' of a shield from Cook, the Clarenceux herald, 
was a man of substance, and had married into a wor- 
shipful family.^ 

Neither of these drafts was fully executed. It may 
have been that the unduly favourable representations 
made to the College respecting John Shake- rj.^^ ^^^j^_ 
speare's social and pecuniary position excited piification 
suspicion even in the credulous and corruptly ° ^^^^' 
interested minds of the heralds. At any rate, Shake- 
speare and his father allowed three years to elapse before 
(as far as extant documents show) they made a further 
endeavour to secure the coveted distinction. In 1599 
their efforts were crowned with success. Changes in 
the interval among the officials at the College may have 
facilitated the proceedings. In 1597 the Earl of Essex 
had become Earl Marshal and chief of the Heralds' 
College (the office had been in commission in 1596) ; 
while the great scholar and antiquary, William Camden, 
had joined the College, also in 1597, as Clarenceux 
King-of-Arms. The poet was favourably known both 
to Camden, the admiring preceptor and friend of Ben 
Jonson,^ and to the Earl of Essex, the close friend of the 

^ These memoranda ran (with interlineations in brackets) : — 

[This John shoeth] A patierne therof under Clarent Cookes hand in paper xx. 
years past. [The Q. officer and cheSe of the towne] 

[A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or xvj. years 
past. 

That he hathe lands and tenements of good weahh and substance [500 li.] 

That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent, of worship). 

2 Camden was in the near neighbourhood of Stratford-on-Avon on 
Aug. 7, 1600, when he organised the elaborate heraldic funeral of old Sir 
Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, and bore the dead knight's ' cote of armes ' 
at the interment in Charlecote Church {Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 556) 



284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Earl of Southampton. His father's appHcation now 
took a new form. No grant of arms was asked for. It 
was asserted without quahfication that the coat, as 
set out in the draft-grants of 1596, had been assigned 
to John Shakespeare while he was baihff, and the heralds 
were merely invited to give him a 'recognition' or 'ex- 
emplification' of it.^ At the same time he asked per- 
mission for himself to impale, and his eldest son and 
other children to quarter, on 'his ancient coat-of-arms ' 
that of the Ardens of Wilmcote, his wife's family. The 
College officers were characteristically complacent. A 
draft was prepared under the hands of Dethick, the 
Garter King, and of Camden, the Clarenceux King, 
granting the required 'exemplification' and authorising 
the required impalement and quartering. On one 
point only did Dethick and Camden betray conscien- 
tious scruples. Shakespeare and his father obviously de- 
sired the heralds to recognise the title of Mary Shake- 
speare (the poet's mother) to bear the arms of the great 
Warwickshire family of Arden, then seated at Park Hall. 
But the relationship, if it existed, was undetermined; 
the Warwickshire Ardens were gentry of influence in 
the county, and were certain to protest against any 
hasty assumption of identity between their line and that 
of the humble farmer of Wilmcote. After tricking the 
Warwickshire Arden coat in the margin of the draft- 
grant for the purpose of indicating the manner of its 
impalement, the heralds on second thoughts erased it. 
They substituted in their sketch the arms of an Arden 
family living at Alvanley in the distant county of 
Cheshire. With that stock there was no pretence that 
Robert Arden of Wilmcote was lineally connected ; but 
the bearers of the Alvanley coat were unlikely to learn 
of its suggested impalement with the Shakespeare 

^ An ' exemplification ' was invariably secured more easily than a 
new grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, 
without examination, the applicant's statement that his family had borne 
arms long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the 
obligation of close inquiry into his present status. 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 285 

shield, and the heralds were less liable to the risk of 
complaint or litigation. But the Shakespeares wisely 
relieved the College of all anxiety by omitting to assume 
the Arden coat. The Shakespeare arms alone are dis- 
played with full heraldic elaboration on the monument 
above the poet's grave in Stratford Church ; they alone 
appear on the seal and on the tombstone of his elder 
daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, impaled with the arms of 
her husband ^ ; and they alone were quartered by Thomas 
Nash, the first husband of the poet's granddaughter, 
EHzabeth Hall.^ 

Shakespeare's victorious quest of" a coat-of-arms was 
one of the many experiences which he shared with pro- 
fessional associates. Two or three officers other 
of the Heralds' College, who disapproved of f^^°\^. 
the easy methods of their colleagues, indeed pre- 
protested against the bestowal on actors of tensions. 
heraldic honours. Special censure was levelled at two 
of Shakespeare's closest professional allies, Augustine 
PhilHps and Thomas Pope, comedians of repute and fel- 
low shareholders in the Globe theatre, whose names 
figure in the prefatory list of the 'principal actors' in 
the First FoKo. At the opening of King James's reign 
WilKam Smith, who held the post of Rouge Dragon 
pursuivant at the Heralds' College and disapproved of 
his colleagues' lenience, poured scorn on the two actors' 
false heraldic pretensions.^ The critic wrote thus : 
' Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes 
of S' W"" Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L. 

^ On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare's elder son-in-law, the 
Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall. 

2 French, Genealogica Shakespeareana, p. 413. 

' Smith's censure figures in an elaborate exposure of recent heraldic 
scandals, which he dedicated to Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, 
K.G., a commissioner for the ofi&ce of Earl Marshal from 1604, and 
thereby a chief controller of the College of Arms. The indictment, which 
is in Smith's autograph, bears the title : 'A brieff Discourse of ye causes 
of Discord amongst ye Officers of arms and of the great abuses and ab- 
surdities com[m]ited by [heraldic] painters to the great prejudice and 
hindrance of the same office.' The MS. was kindly lent to the present 
writer by Messrs. Pearson & Co., Pall Mall Place. 



286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Bardolph's cote quartred, which I shewed to M"" York 
[i.e. Ralph Brooke, another rigorous champion of heraldic 
orthodoxy], at a small graver's shopp in Foster Lane' 
(leaf 8a). Phillips's irresponsibly adopted ancestor, 
'Sir William Phillipp, Lord Bardolph,' won renown at 
Agincourt in 141 5, and the old warrior's title of Lord 
Bardolf or Bardolph received satiric commemoration at 
Shakespeare's hands when the dramatist bestowed on 
Falstaff's red-nosed companion the name of his actor- 
friend's imaginary progenitor. Smith's charge against 
Thomas Pope was to similar effect : ' Pope the player 
would have no other armes but the armes of S'' Tho. 
Pope, Chancelor of ye Augmentations.' Player Pope's 
alleged sponsor in heraldry. Sir Thomas Pope, was the 
Privy Councillor, who died without issue in the first year 
of Queen Elizabeth's reign, after founding Trinity Col- 
lege, Oxford. Shakespeare's claim in his own heraldic 
application to descent from unspecified persons who 
did 'valiant and faithful service' in Henry the Seventh's 
time was comparatively modest. But his heraldic 
adventure had good precedent in the contemporary 
ambition of the theatrical profession. 

Rouge Dragon Smith omitted specific mention of 
Shakespeare; but his equally censorious colleague, 
„ ^ Ralph Brooke, York Herald, was less reticent. 

Contempo- /^ i r o • i r! i i 

rary criti- Independently of Smith, Brooke drew up a 
Shake- ^^^ ^^ twenty-three persons whom he charged 
speare's with obtaining coats-of-arms on more or less 
^^^^' fraudulent representations. Fourth on his 

list stands the surname Shakespeare, and eight places 
below appears that of Cowley, who may be identified 
with Shakespeare's actor friend, Richard Cowley, the 
creator of Verges, in 'Much Ado about Nothing.' In 
thirteen cases Brooke particularises with sarcastic heat 
the imposture which he claims to expose.^ But Shake- 

^ This heraldic manuscript, which was also lent me by Messrs. Pear- 
son, is a paper book of seventeen leaves, without title, containing des- 
ultory notes on grants of arms which (it was urged) had been errone- 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 287 

speare's name is merely mentioned in Brooke's long 
indictment without annotation. Elsewhere the critic 
took the less serious objection that the arms ' exemplified ' 
to Shakespeare usurped the coat of Lord Mauley, on 
whose shield 'a bend sable' also figured. Dethick and 
Camden, the official guardians of heraldic etiquette, 
deemed it fitting to reply on this minor technical issue. 
They pointed out that the Shakespeare shield bore no 
greater resemblance to the Mauley coat than it did to 
that of the Harley and the Ferrers famihes, both of 
which also bore 'a bend sable,' but that in point of fact 
it differed conspicuously from all three by the presence 
of a spear on the 'bend.' Dethick and Camden added, 
with customary want of precision, that the person to 
whom the grant was made had 'borne magistracy and 
was justice of peace at Stratford-on-Avon ; he maried 
the daughter and heire of Arderne, and was able to 
maintain that Estate.' ^ 

While the negotiation with the College of Arms was in 
progress in the elder Shakespeare's name, the poet had 
taken openly in his own person a more effective purchase 
step towards rehabilitating himself and his of New 
family in the eyes of his fellow- townsmen at ^^^^' 
Stratford. On May 4, 1597, he purchased the largest 

ously made by Sir William Dethick, Garter King, at the end of Queen 
Elizabeth's reign. Two handwritings figure in these pages, one of which 
is the autograph of Ralph Brooke, York Herald, and the other, which is 
not identified, may be that of Brooke's clerk. Brooke's detailed charges 
include statements that an embroiderer, calling himself Parr, who failed 
to give proof of his right to that surname and was unquestionably the 
son of a pedlar, received permission to use the crest and coat of Sir 
WUliam Parr, Marquis of Northampton, who died in 157 1 'the last male 
of his house.' Three other men, who bought honourable pedigrees of 
the college, are credited with the occupations respectively of a seller of 
stockings, a haberdasher, and a stationer or printer, while a fourth 
offender was stated to be an alien. In some cases Garter was charged 
with pocketing his fee, and then with prudently postponing the formal 
issue of the promised grant of arms until the applicant was dead. 

^ The details of Brooke's second accusation are deduced from the 
answer of Garter and Clarenceux to his complaint. Two copies of the 
answer are accessible : one is in the vol. W-Z at the Heralds' College, f . 
276; and the other, slightly differing, is in Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. 
Both are printed in the Herald and Genealogist, i. 514. 



288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

house but one in the town. The edifice, which was known 
as New Place, had been built by Sir Hugh Clopton more 
than a century before, and seems to have fallen into 
a ruinous condition. But Shakespeare paid for it, 
with two barns and two gardens, the then substantial 
sum of 60/. A curious incident postponed legal posses- 
sion. The vendor of the Stratford 'manor-house,' 
William Underbill, died suddenly of poison at another 
residence in the county, Fillongley near Coventry, 
and the legal transfer of New Place to the dramatist was 
left at the time incomplete. Underhill's eldest son Fulk 
died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death 
he was proved to have murdered his father. The family 
estates were thus in jeopardy of forfeiture, but they were 
suffered to pass to 'the felon's' next brother Hercules, 
who on coming of age in May 1602 completed in a new 
deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.^ There 
was only one larger house in the town — the College, 
which had before the Reformation been the official home 
of the clergy of the parish church, and was subsequently 
confiscated by the Crown. In 1596 that imposing resi- 
dence was acquired by a rich native of Stratford, 
Thomas Combe, whose social relations with Shakespeare 
were soon close. ^ In 1598, a year after his purchase of 
New Place, the dramatist procured stone for the repair 
of the house, and before 1602 he had set a fruit orchard 
in the land adjoining it. He is traditionally said to have 
interested himself in the spacious garden, and to have 
planted with his own hands a mulberry-tree, which was 
long a prominent feature of it. When this tree was cut 
down in 1758, numerous relics, which were made from the 
wood, were treated with an almost superstitious venera- 
tion.^ 

^ Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries, p. 232. 
Halliwell's History of New Place, 1863, folio, collects a mass of pertinent 
information on the fortunes of Shakespeare's mansion. 

2 See p. 467 infra. 

^ The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry-tree was not 
put on record till it was cut down in 1758 (see p. 514 infra). In 1760 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 289 

Shakespeare does not appear to have permanently 
settled at New Place till 161 1. In 1609 the house, or 
part of it, was occupied by Thomas Greene, ' ahas Shake- 
speare,' a lawyer, who claimed to be the poet's cousin. 
Greene's mother or grandmother seems to have been a 
Shakespeare. He was for a time town-clerk of the 
town, and acted occasionally as the poet's legal 
adviser.^ 

It was doubtless under their son's guidance that 
Shakespeare's father and mother set on foot in November 
1597 — six months after his acquisition of New Place 
— a fresh lawsuit against John Lambert, his mother's 
nephew, for the recovery of her mortgaged estate of 
Asbies in Wilmcote.^ The htigation dragged on till near 
the end of the century with some appearance of favour- 
mention is made of it in a letter of thanks in the corporation's archives 
from the Steward of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford 
for presenting him with a standish made from the wood. But, according 
to the testimony of old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his Life of 
Shakespeare, 1790, p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Strat- 
ford since Shakespeare's lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 
1609, when a Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young 
mulberry- trees through the midland counties by order of James I., who 
desired to encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 
134, 411-16). Thomas Sharp, a wood-carver of Stratford-on-Avon, was 
chiefly responsible for the eighteenth century mementos of the tree — 
goblets or fancy boxes or inkstands. But far more objects than could 
possibly be genuine have been represented by dealers as being manu- 
factured from Shakespeare's mulberry-tree. From a slip of the original 
tree is derived the mulberry-tree which still flourishes on the central 
lawn of New Place garden. Another slip of the original tree was ac- 
quired by Edward Capell, the Shakespearean commentator, and was 
planted by him in the garden of his residence, Troston Hall, near Bury 
St. Edmunds. That tree lived for more than a century, and many cut- 
tings taken from it still survive. One scion was presented by the owner 
of Troston Hall to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in October 1896, 
and flourishes there, being labelled ' Shakespeare's mulberry.' The Direc- 
tor of Kew Gardens, Lieut.-Col. Sir David Prain, writes to me (March 
23, 1915) confirming the authenticity of 'our tree's descent.' Sir David 
adds, 'We have propagated from it rather freely, have planted various 
offshoots from it in various parts of the garden, and have sent plants to 
places where there are memorials of Shakespeare and to people interested 
in matters relating to him.' 

^ See pp. 473—4 infra. 

2 HalliweU-Phillipps, ii. 13-17; cf. Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's En- 
vironment, 45—47. See also p. 14 supra. 



290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ing the dramatist's parents, but, in the result, the estate 
remained in Lambert's hands. 

The purchase of New Place is a signal proof of Shake- 
speare's growing prosperity, and the transaction made 
Shake- 3- deep impression on his fellow-townsmen, 
speareand Letters written during 1598 by leading men 
townsmen at Stratford, which are extant among the 
in isgs. archives of the Corporation and of the Birth- 
place Trustees, leave no doubt of the reputation for 
wealth and influence which he straightway acquired in 
his native place. His Stratford neighbours stood in 
urgent need of his help. In the summer of 1594 a severe 
fire did much damage in the town, and a second out- 
break ' on the same day ' twelve months later intensified 
the suffering. The two fires destroyed 120 dwelling- 
houses, estimated to be worth 12,000/., and 400 persons 
were rendered homeless and destitute. Both confla- 
grations started on the Lord's Day, and Puritan preach- 
ers through the country suggested that the double dis- 
aster was a divine judgment on the townsfolk 'chiefly 
for prophaning the Lords Sabbaths, and for contemning 
his word in the mouth of his faithfull Ministers.' ^ In 
accordance with precedent, the Town Council obtained 
permission from the quarter sessions of the county to 
appeal for help to the country at large, and the leading 
townsmen were despatched to various parts of the 
kingdom to make collections. The Stratford collectors 
began their first tour in the autumn of 1594, and their 
second in the autumn of the following year. Shake- 
speare's friends. Alderman Richard Quiney the elder, 
and John Sadler, were especially active on these expe- 
ditions, and the returns were satisfactory, though the 
collectors' personal expenses ran high.^ But new troubles 

^ Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety, 1613 ed., p. 551. Bayly's alle- 
gation is repeated in Thomas Beard's Theatre of God's Judgements, 1631, 

P- 555- 

2 Full details of the collections of 1594 appear in Stratford Council 
Book B, under dates September 24 and October 25. Richard Quiney 
obtained from some of the Colleges at Oxford the sum of 7Z. os. iid. 



. THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 291 

followed to depress the fortunes of the town. The har- 
vests of 1594 and the three following years yielded badly. 
The prices of grain rapidly rose. The consequent dis- 
tress was acute and recovery was slow. The town suf- 
fered additional hardships owing to a royal proclama- 
tion of 1597, which forbade all but farmers who grew 
barley to brew malt between Lady Day and Michaelmas, 
and restrictions were placed on 'the excessive buying of 
barley for that use and purpose.' ^ Every householder 
of Stratford had long been in the habit of making malt ; 
'servants were hired only to that purpose.' Urban em- 
ployment was thus diminished ; while the domestic 
brewing of beer was seriously hindered in the interest of 
the farmer-maltsters to the grievous injury of the hum- 
bler townsfolk. Early in 1598 the 'dearness of corn' at 
Stratford was reported to be 'beyond all other counties,' 
and riots threatened among the labouring people. The 
town council sought to meet the difficulty by ordering 
an inventory of the corn and malt in the borough. 
Shakespeare, who was described as a householder in 
Chapel Street, in which New Place stood, was reported 
to own the very substantial quantity of ten quarters or 
eighty bushels of corn and malt. Only two inhabitants 
were credited with larger holdings.^ 

and he and Sadler with two others obtained from Northampton as much 
as 26I. los. $d. Documents describing the collections for both years 
1594 and 1595 are in the Wheler Papers, vol. i. flf. 43-4. In the latter 
year Quiney and Sadler begged with success through the chief towns 
of Norfolk and Suffolk and afterwards visited Lincoln and London ; but 
of the 75/. 6s. which was received Quiney disbursed as much as 54^. gs. 
4d. on expenses of travel. The journey lasted from October 18, 1595, 
to January 26, 1595-6, and horse-hire cost a shilling a day. In 1595 
the corporation of Leicester gave to ' collectors of the town of Stratf orde- 
upon-Haven 135. 4d. in regard of their loss by fire.' (W. Kelly, Notices 
illustrative of the drama at Leicester, 1865, p. 224; Records of the Borough 
of Leicester, ed. Bateson, 1905, iii. 320.) 

' Acts of the Privy Council, 1597-9, pp. 314 seq. 

^The return, dated February 4, 1597-8, is printed from the corpora- 
tion records by Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 58. The respective amounts of 
corn and malt are not distinguished save in the case of Thomas Badsey, 
who is credited with 'vj. quarters, bareley j. quarter.' The two neigh- 
bours of Shakespeare who possessed a larger store of corn and malt were 



292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

While Stratford was in the grip of such disasters 
ParHament met at Westminster in 1597 and imposed on 
the country fresh and formidable taxation.^ The ma- 
chinery of collection was soon set in motion and the 
impoverished community of Stratford saw all hope 
shattered of recovering its solvency. Thereupon in 
January 1598 the Council sent a delegate to London to 
represent to the Government the critical state of its 

affairs. The choice fell on Shakespeare's friend, 
Quiney's Alderman Richard Quiney, a draper of the 
mission to town who had served the office of baiHff in 1 1^92, 

and was re-elected in 1601, dying during his 
second term of ofhce. Quiney and his family stood high 
in local esteem. His father Adrian Quiney, commonly 
described as 'a mercer,' was still living; he had been 
bailiff in 1571, the year preceding John Shakespeare's 
election. Quiney's mission detained him in London for 
the greater part of twelve months. He lodged at the Bell 
Inn in Carter Lane. Friends at Stratford constantly im- 
portuned Quiney by letter to enlist the influence of great 
men in the endeavour to obtain relief for the townsmen, 
but it was on Shakespeare that he was counselled to place 
his chief reliance. During his sojourn in the capital, 
Quiney was therefore in frequent intercourse with the 
dramatist. Besides securing an 'ease and discharge of 
such taxes and subsidies wherewith our town is likely to 
be charged,' he hoped to obtain from the Court of Ex- 
chequer relief for the local maltsters, and to raise a loan 
of money wherewith to meet the Corporation's current 
needs. A further aim was to borrow money for the 
commercial enterprises of himself and his family. In 
fulfilling all these purposes Quiney and his friends at 
Stratford were sanguine of benefiting by Shakespeare's 
influence and prosperity.. 

'Mr. Thomas Dyxon, xvij quarters,' and 'Mr. Aspinall, aboutes xj 
quarters.' Shakespeare's friend Julius Shaw owned 'vij. quarters.' 

1 Three lay subsidies, six fifteenths, and three clerical subsidies were 
granted. 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 293 

Quiney's most energetic local correspondent was his 
wife's brother, Abraham Sturley, an enterprising trades- 
man, who was bailiff of Stratford in 1 596. He had gained 
at the Stratford grammar school a command of colloquial 
Latin and was prone to season his correspondence with 
Latin phrases. Sturley gave constant proof of his faith 
in Shakespeare's present and future fortune. On January 
24, 1597-8, he wrote to Quiney from Stratford, of his 
'great fear and doubt' that the burgesses were 'by no 
means able to pay' any of the taxes. He added a signifi- 
cant message in regard to Shakespeare's fiscal affairs : 
'This is one special remembrance from [Adrian Quiney] 
our father's motion. It seemeth by him that our coun- 
tryman, Mr. Shaksper, is willing to disburse some money 
upon some odd yardland ^ or other at Shottery, or near 
about us : he thinketh it a very fit pattern to move him 
to deal in the matter of our tithes. By the instructions 
you can give him thereof, and by the friends he can 
make therefor, we think it a fair mark for him to shoot 
at, and not impossible to hit. It obtained would ad- 
vance him indeed, and would do us much good.' After 
his manner Sturley reinforced the exhortation by a 
Latin rendering : ' Hoc movere, et quantum in te est 
permovere, ne necligas, hoc enim et sibi et nobis maximi 
erit momenti. Hie labor, hie opus esset eximie et gloriae 
et laudis sibi.' ^ As far as Shottery, the native hamlet of 
Shakespeare's wife, was concerned, the suggestion was 
without effect; but in the matter of the tithes Shake- 
speare soon took very practical steps.^ 

Some months later, on November 4, 1598, Sturley 
was still pursuing the campaign with undiminished 
vigour. He now expressed anxiety to hear 'that our 

^ A yardland was the technical name of a plot averaging between 
thirty and forty acres. 

2 'To urge this, and as far as in you lies to persist herein, neglect not ; 
for this will be of the greatest importance both to him and to us. Here 
pre-eminently would be a task, here would be a work of glory and praise 
for him.' 

' See p. 319 infra. 



294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

countryman, Mr. Wm. Shak., would procure us money, 
Local which I will like of, as I shall hear when, 

appeals and whcre, and how, and I pray let not go 
°"^ ^' ■ that occasion if it may sort to any indifferent 
[i.e. reasonable] conditions.' 

Neither the writer nor Richard Quiney, his brother-in- 
law, whom he was addressing, disguised their hope of 
Richard pcrsoual advantage from the dramatist's afiflu- 
Quiney's euce. Amid his public activities in London, 

letter to . 

Shake- Qumey appealed to Shakespeare for a loan of 
speare. money wherewith to discharge pressing private 
debts. The letter, which is interspersed with references 
to Quiney's municipal mission, ran thus : ' Loveinge 
contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge 
yowr helpe with xxxli vppon Mr. Bushells and my 
securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is 
nott come to London as yeate, and I have especiall 
cawse. Yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeing me out 
of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke God, 
& muche quiet my mynde, which wolde nott be in- 
debeted. [I am nowe towardes the Courte, in hope of 
answer for the dispatche of my buysenes.] Yow shal 
nether loase creddytt nor monney by me, the Lorde 
wyllinge; & nowe butt perswade yowrselfe soe, as I 
hope, & yow shall nott need to feare, butt, with all 
hartie thanckefullenes, I wyll holde my tyme, & content 
yowr ffrende, & yf we bargaine farther, yow shal be 
the paie-master yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hastene 
to an ende, & soe I committ thys [to] yowr care & hope 
of yowr helpe. [I feare I shall nott be backe thys night 
ffrom the Cowrte.] Haste. The Lorde be with yow & 
with vs all. Amen ! ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 
25 October, 1598. Yowrs in all kyndenes, Ryc. Quy- 
NEY.' Outside the letter was the superscription in 
Quiney's hand: 'To my loveinge good ffrend and con- 
treymann Mr. Wm. Shackespere deliver thees.' 

This document is preserved at Shakespeare's Birth- 
place and enjoys the distinction of being the only sur- 



THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE 295 

viving letter which was delivered into Shakespeare's 
hand. Quiney, Shakespeare's would-be debtor, informed 
his family at Stratford of his application for money, and 
he soon received the sanguine message from his father 
Adrian : ' If you bargain with William Shakespeare, or 
receive money therefor, bring your money home that 
[i.e. as] you may.' ^ It may justly be inferred that 
Shakespeare did not behe the confidence which his fellow- 
townsmen reposed both in his good will towards them 
and in his powers of assistance. In due time Quiney's 
long-drawn mission was crowned on the leading issue 
with success. On January 27, 1598-9, a warrant was 
signed at Westminster by the Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer releasing 'the ancient borough' from the pay- 
ment of the pending taxes on the 'reasonable and con- 
scionable' grounds of the recent fires. 

^ This letter, which is undated, may be assigned to November or 
December 1598, and in the course of it Adrian Quiney urged his son to 
lay in a generous supply of knitted stockings for which a large demand 
was reported in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Much of Abraham 
Sturley's and Richard Quiney's correspondence remains, with other 
notes respecting the town's claims for relief from the subsidy of 1598, 
among the archives at the Birthplace at Stratford. (Cf. Catalogue of 
Shakespeare's Birthplace, 1910, pp. 11 2-3.) In the Variorum Shake- 
speare, 1821, vol. ii. pp. 561 seq., Malone first printed four of Sturley's 
letters, of which one is wholly in Latin. Halliwell-Phillipps reprinted 
in his Outlines, ii. 57 seq., two of these letters dated respectively January 
24, 1597-8, and November 4, 1598, from which citation is made above, 
together with the undated letter of Adrian Quiney to his son Richard. 



XV 

SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 

The financial prosperity to which the correspondence 
just cited and the transactions immediately preceding 
Financial ^^ point has been treated as one of the chief 
position be- mystcries of Shakespeare's career, but the 
fore 1599. (difficulties are gratuitous. A close study of 
the available information leaves practically nothing in 
Shakespeare's financial position which the contemporary 
conditions of theatrical Hfe fail to explain. It was not 
until 1599, when Shakespeare co-operated in the erection 
of the Globe theatre, that he acquired any share in the 
profits of a playhouse. But his revenues as a successful 
dramatist and actor were by no means contemptible at 
an earlier date, although at a later period their dimensions 
greatly expanded. 

Shakespeare's gains in the capacity of dramatist 
formed through the first half of his professional career a 
Drama- Smaller source of income than his wages as an 
tists' fees actor. The highest price known to have been 
until 1599- pg^j^j before 1599 to an author for a play by the 
manager of an acting company was 11/.; 61. was the 
lowest rate.^ A small additional gratuity — rarely ex- 
ceeding ten shillings — was bestowed on a dramatist 
whose piece on its first production was especially well 

^ The purchasing power of a pound during Shakespeare's prime may- 
be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and luxuries as equiva- 
lent to that of five pounds of the present currency. The money value of 
corn then and now is nearly identical; but other necessaries of life — 
meat, milk, eggs, wool, building materials, and the like — were much 
cheaper in Shakespeare's day. In 1586 a leg of veal and a shoulder of 
mutton at Stratford each sold for tenpence, a loin of veal for a shilling, 
and a quarter of lamb for twopence more (Halliwell, Cat. Stratford Records, 
p. 334). Threepence was the statutory price of a gallon of beer. 

296 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 297 

received; and the author was by custom allotted, by 
way of 'benefit,' a certain proportion of the receipts of the 
theatre on the production of a play for the second time.'^ 
Other sums, amounting at times to as much as 4I., were 
bestowed on the author for revising and altering an old 
play for a revival. The nineteen plays which may be 
set to Shakespeare's credit between 1591 and 1599, 
combined with such revising work as fell to his lot 
during those nine years, cannot consequently have 
brought him less than 200I., or some 20/. a year. Eight 
or nine of these plays were published during the period, 
but the publishers operated independently of the author, 
taking all the risks and, at the same time, all the receipts. 
The company usually forbade under heavy penalties 
the author's sale to a publisher of a play which had been 
acted. The publication of Shakespeare's plays in no 
way affected his monetary resources. But his friendly 
relations with the printer Field doubtless secured him, 
despite the absence of any copyright law, some part of 
the profits in the large and continuous sale of his narrative 
poems. At the same time the dedications of the poems, 
in accordance with contemporary custom, brought him a 
tangible reward. The pecuniary recognition which patrons 
accorded to dedicatory epistles varied greatly, and ranged 
from a fee of two or three pounds to a substantial pen- 
sion. Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, 
was conspicuous for his generous gifts to men of letters 
who sought his good graces.^ 

^ Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq., and ed. Greg. ii. 
no seq. 'Beneficial second days' were reckoned among dramatists' 
sources of income until the Civil War. (Cf. 'Actors' Remonstrance,' 
1643, ill Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage, 186.9, P- 264.) After the 
Restoration the receipts of the third performance were given for the 
author's 'benefit.' 

2 Cf. Malone's Variorum, iii. 164, and p. 197 supra. The ninth Earl 
of Northumberland gave to George Peele 3/. in June 1593 on the presen- 
tation of a congratulatory poem {Hist. MSS. Comm. vi. App. p. 227), 
while to two literary mathematicians, Walter Warner and Thomas 
Harriot, he gave pensions of 40/. and 120/. a year respectively (Aubrey's 
Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 16). See Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession 
in the Elizabethan Age, 1909, pp. 26, 32. 



298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

But it was as an actor that at an early date Shakespeare 
acquired a genuinely substantial and secure income. 
Affluence There is abundance of contemporary evidence 
of actors, ^o show that the stage was for an efficient actor 
an assured avenue to comparative wealth. In 1590 
Robert Greene describes in his tract entitled 'Never too 
Late' a meeting with a player whom he took by his 
'outward habit' to be 'a gentleman of great living' and 
a 'substantial man.' The player informed Greene that 
he had at the beginning of his career travelled on foot, 
bearing his theatrical properties on his back, but he 
prospered so rapidly that at the time of speaking 'his 
very share in playing apparel would not be sold for 200/.' 
Among his neighbours 'where he dwelt' he was reputed 
able 'at his proper cost to build a windmill.' In the 
university play, 'The Return from Parnassus' (1601?), 
a poor student enviously complains of the wealth and 
position which a successful actor derived from his calling : 

England affords those glorious vagabonds, 

That carried erst their fardles on their backs, 

Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets, 

Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits, 

And pages to attend their masterships ; 

With mouthing words that better wits had framed, 

They purchase lands and now esquires are made.^ 

The travelling actors, who gave a performance at the 
bidding of the highwayman, Gamaliel Ratsey, in 1605, 
received from him no higher gratuity than forty shil- 

^ Return from Parnassus, v. i. 10-16. Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]'s Laquei 
Ridiciilosi or Springes for Woodcocks, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed 
' Theatrum Licencia ' : 

Cotta's become a player most men know, 

And will no longer take such toyling paines ; 
For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow 

And brings them damnable excessive gaines 
That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs, 

Since Greene's Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs. 

Greene's Tu Quoque was a popular comedy that had once been performed 
at Court by the Queen's players, and 'Garlicke Jigs' alluded derisively 
to drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much 
esteem from patrons of the smaller playhouses. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 299 

lings to be divided among them ; but the company was 
credited with a confident anticipation of far more generous 
remuneration in London. According to the author of 
'The Pilgrimage to Parnassus' (1601?), Shakespeare's 
colleague Will Kemp assured undergraduate aspirants 
to the stage : ' You haue happened vpon the most 
excellent vocation in the world for money : they come 
north and south to bring it to our playhouse, and for 
honours, who of more report, then Dick Burhage and Will 
Kempe ?^ (iv. iii. 1826-32). The scale of the London 
actors' salaries rose rapidly during Shakespeare's career, 
and was graduated according to capacity and experience. 
A novice who received ten shillings a week in a London 
theatre in 1597 could count on twice that sum thirty 
years later, although the rates were always reduced by 
half when the company was touring the provinces. A 
player of the highest rank enjoyed in London in the 
generation following Shakespeare's death an annual 
stipend of 180/.^ Shakespeare's emoluments as an actor, 
whether in London or the provinces, are not -p&ezior 
likely to have fallen before 1599 below 100/. Court per- 
Very substantial remuneration was also de- °'^™^^'^^^- 
rived by his company from performances at Court or 
in noblemen's houses, and from that source his yearly 
revenues would receive an addition of something ap- 
proaching 10/.^ 

^ Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 291 ; documents of 1635 cited 
by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 310 seq. 

2 Each piece acted before Queen Elizabeth at Court was awarded 
10/., which was composed of a fixed official fee of 61. 135. i\d. and of a 
special royal gratuity of 3/. 65. M. The number of actors among whom 
the money was divided was commonly few. In 1594 a sum of 20I. in 
payment of two plays was divided by Shakespeare and his two acting 
colleagues, Burbage and Kemp, each receiving 6/. 135. /\d. apiece (see 
p. 87). Shakespeare's company performed six plays at Court during 
the Christmas festivities of 1596, and four each of those of 1597-8 and 
1601-2. The fees for performances at private houses varied but were 
usually smaller than those at the royal palaces. In the play of ' Sir 
Thomas More' probably written about 1598, a professional company of 
players received ten angels {i.e. 5/.) for a performance in a private man- 
sion. {Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. Tucker Brooke, p. 407.) 



300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Thus a sum approaching 150/. (equal to 750/. of to-day) 
would be Shakespeare's average annual revenue before 
Shake- ^599- Such a sum would be regarded as a very 
speare's large income in a country town. According to 
bcomf th^ author of ' Ratseis Ghost, ' the actor practised 
before in London a strict frugality. There seems no 
^^^^' reason why Shakespeare should not have been 

able in 1597 to draw from his savings 60/. wherewith to 
buy New Place. His resources might well justify his 
fellow- townsmen's high opinion of his wealth in 1598, 
and suffice between 1597 and 1599 to meet his expenses, 
in rebuilding the house, stocking the barns with grain, and 
conducting various legal proceedings. But, according to 
an early and well-attested tradition, he had in the Earl 
of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were 
dedicated, a wealthy and exceptionally generous patron, 
who on one occasion gave him as much as one thousand 
pounds to enable ' him to go through with ' a purchase to 
which he had a mind. A munificent gift, added to 
professional gains, leaves nothing unaccounted for in 
Shakespeare's financial position before 1599. 

From 1599 onwards Shakespeare's relations with 
theatrical enterprise assumed a different phase and his 
Shake- pecuniary resources grew materially. When 
speare's in 1 598 the actor Richard Burbage and his 
theGbbe brother Cuthbert, who owned 'The Theatre' 
theatre in Shoreditch, resolved to transfer the fabric to 
rom 1599. ^ ^^^ gj^g j^ Southwark, they enlisted the 
personal co-operation and the financial support of Shake- 
speare and of four other prosperous acting colleagues, 
Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and 
John Heminges. For a term of thirty-one years running 
from Christmas 1598 a large plot of land on the Bankside 
was leased by the Burbages, in alliance with Shakespeare 
and the four other actors. The Burbage brothers made 
themselves responsible for one half of the liability and the 
remaining five accepted joint responsibility for the other 
half. The deed was finally executed by the seven lessees 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 301 

on February 21, 1598-9. The annual rental of the 
Bankside site was 14I. los., and on it Shakespeare and 
his partners straightway erected, at an outlay of some 
500/. which was variously distributed among them, the 
new Globe theatre. Much timber from the dismantled 
Shoreditch theatre was incorporated in the new build- 
ing, which was ready for opening in May. 

There is conclusive evidence that Shakespeare played 
a foremost part in both the initiation and the develop- 
ment of the new playhouse. On May 16, 1599, as a lessee 
the Globe property was described, in a formal °^ the site, 
inventory of the estate of which it formed part, as in the 
occupation of WilHam Shakespeare and others.' ^ The 
dramatist's name was alone specified — a proof that 
his reputation excelled that of any of his six partners. 
Some two years later the demise on October 12, 1601, of 
Nicholas Brend, then the ground landlord, who left an 
infant heir Matthew, compelled a resettlement of the 
estate, and the many inevitable legal documents de- 
scribed the tenants of the playhouse as ' Richard Burbage 
and William Shackespeare, Gent ' ; the greatest of his 
actor alKes was thus joined with the dramatist. This 
description of the Globe tenancy was frequently repeated 
in legal instruments affecting the Brend property in 
later years. Although the formula ultimately received 
the addition of two other partners, Cuthbert Burbage 
and John Heminges, Shakespeare's name so long as the 
Globe survived was retained as one of the tenants in 
documents defining the tenancy. The estate records of 
South wark thereby kept alive the memory of the dram- 
atist in his capacity of theatrical shareholder,^ after he 
was laid in his grave. 

^ This description appears in the ' inquisitio post mortem ' (dated 
May 12, 1599) of the property of the lately deceased Thomas Brend, who 
had owned the Bankside site and had left it to his son, Nicholas Brend. 

2 The Globe theatre was demolished in 1644, twenty-eight years after 
the dramatist's death. See the newly discovered documents in the 
Public Record Office cited by Dr. C. W. Wallace in 'New Light on 
Shakespeare' in The Times, April 30 and May i, 19 14. 



302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

On the foundation of the Globe theatre the proprietor- 
ship was divided among the seven owners in ten shares. 

The fixed moiety which the two Burbages ac- 
actor- quired at the outset they or their representa- 

share- tives held nearly as long as the playhouse lasted. 

The other moiety was originally divided equally 
among Shakespeare and his four colleagues. There was 
at no point anything unusual in such an apphcation of 
shareholding principles.^ It was quite customary for 
leading members of an acting company to acquire in- 
dividually at the meridian of their careers a proprietary 
interest in the theatre which their company occupied. 
Hamlet claims, in the play scene (iii. ii. 293), that the 
success of his improvised tragedy deserved to 'get him 
a fellowship in a cry of players ' — evidence that a success- 
ful dramatist no less than a successful actor expected 
such a reward for/ a conspicuous effort.^ Shakespeare 

^ James Burbage had m 1576 allotted shares in the receipts of The 
Theatre to those who had advanced him capital; but these investors 
were commercial men and their relations with the managerial owner 
differed from those subsisting between his sons and the actors who held 
shares with them in the Bankside playhouse. The Curtain theatre was 
also a shareholding concern, and actors in course of time figured among 
the proprietors ; shares in the Curtain were devised by will by the actors 
Thomas Pope (in 1603) and John Underwood (in 1624). (Cf. CoUier's 
Lives of the Actors.) The property of the Whitefriars theatre (in 1608) 
was divided, like that of the Globe, into fixed moieties, each of which 
was distributed independently among a differing number of sharers 
(New Shakspere Soc. Trans. iSSy-g 2, pp. 271 seq.). Heminges produced 
evidence in the suit Keysar v. Heminges, Condell and others in the Court 
of Requests in 1608 (see pp. 309-312 infra) to show that the moiety of 
the Globe which Shakespeare and he shared was converted at the outset 
into 'a joint tenancy' which deprived the individual shareholder of any 
right to his share on his death or on his withdrawal from the company, 
and left it to be shared in that event by surviving shareholders, the last 
survivor thus obtaining the whole. But this legal device, if not re- 
voked, was ignored, for the two sharing colleagues of Shakespeare who 
died earliest, Thomas Pope (in 1603) and Augustine Phillips (in 1605), 
both bequeathed their shares to their heirs. 

2 Later litigation suggests that a successful actor often claimed as a 
right at one or other period of his career the apportionment of a share 
in the theatrical estate. Sometimes the share was accepted in lieu of 
wages. After Paris Garden on the Bankside was rebuilt as a theatre in 
1613, the owners Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade, engaged for the 
Lady Elizabeth's company which was then occupying the stage an actor 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 303 

as both actor and playwright of his company had an 
exceptionally strong claim to a proprietary interest, but 
contemporaries who were authors only are known to 
have enjoyed the same experience. John Marston, the 
well-known dramatist, owned before 1608 a share in the 
Blackfriars theatre. Through the same period Michael 
Drayton, whose fame as a poet was greater than that 
as a dramatist, was, with hack playwrights like Lodo- 
wick (or Lording) Barry and John Mason, a shareholder 
in the Whitefriars theatre.^ The shareholders, whether 
they were actors or dramatists, or merely organising 
auxiliaries of the profession, were soon technically known 
as the 'housekeepers.' Actors of the company who held 
no shares were distinguished by the title of 'the hired 
actors' or 'hirelings' or 'journeymen,' and they usually 
bound themselves to serve the ' housekeepers ' for a term 
of years under heavy penalties for breach of their en- 
gagement.^ 

named Robert Dawes for three years '/or &° at the rate of one whole share, 
according to the custom of players' {Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, 124; 
cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg. ii. 139.) In other cases the share was 
paid for by the actor, who received a salary, in addition to his dividend. 
The greedy eyes which aspiring actors cast on theatrical shares is prob- 
ably satirised in Troilus and Cressida, 11. iii. 214, where Ulysses addresses 
to Ajax in his sullen pride the taunt ' 'A would have ten shares.' In 
Dekker and Webster's play of Northward Ho, 1607, Act iv. sc. i. (Dekker's 
Works, iii. p. 45), 'a player' who is also 'a sharer' is referred to as a per- 
son of great importance. In 1635 three junior members of Shakespeare's 
old company, Robert Benfield, Hilliard Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, 
jointly petitioned the Lord Chamberlain of the day (the Earl of Pem- 
broke and Montgomery) for compulsory authority to purchase of John 
Shanks, a fellow actor who had accumulated shares on a liberal scale, 
three shares in the Globe and two in the Blackfriars. Their petition 
was granted, John Shanks had bought his five shares of Heminges's son, 
William, in 1633, for a total outlay of 506/. (See documents in extenso 
in Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines, i. 31 1-4.) 

^ See documents from Public Record Office relating to a suit brought 
against the shareholders in the Whitefriars theatre in 1609 in New Shak. 
Soc. Trans. 1889-92, pp. 269 seq. 

^ In Dekker's tract, A Knight's Conjuring, 1607 (Percy Soc. p. 65), a 
company of 'country players' is said to consist of 'one sharer and the 
rest journeymen.' In the satiric play Histriomastix, 16 10, 'hired men' 
among the actors are sharply contrasted with 'sharers' and 'master- 
sharers.' 



304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Thus when the Globe theatre opened the actor and 
dramatist Shakespeare was a 'housekeeper' owning a 
hi tenth part of the estate. The share entitled 
tory of him to a tenth part of the profits, but also 
speMe's made him responsible for a tenth part of the 
shares, ground-rent and of the working expenses. Till 
1599-1616. j^-g (^g^i-j^ — fQj. some fifteen or sixteen years — 

he probably drew a substantial profit-income from the 
Globe venture. But the moiety of the property to which 
his holding belonged experienced some redivisions which 
modified from time to time the proportion of his receipts 
and liabiHties. Within six months of the inauguration 
of the Globe, William Kemp, the great comic actor, who 
had just created the part of Dogberry in Shakespeare's 
'Much Ado,' abandoned his single share, which was 
equivalent to a tenth part of the whole. Kemp resented, 
it has been alleged, a reproof from his colleagues for his 
practice of inventing comic ' gag.' However that may be, 
his holding was distributed in four equal parts among 
his former partners in the second moiety. For some 
years therefore Shakespeare owned a share and a quarter, 
or an eighth instead of a tenth part of the collective 
estate. The actor-shareholder Pope died in 1603 and 
Phillips two years later, and their interest was devised 
by them by will to their respective heirs who were not 
members of the profession. Subsequently fresh actors 
of note were, according to the recognised custom, suf- 
fered to participate anew in the second moiety, and 
Shakespeare's proportionate interest experienced modi- 
fication accordingly. In 16 10 Henry Condell, a prom- 
inent acting colleague, with whom Shakespeare's rela- 
tions were soon as close as with Burbage and Heminges, 
was allotted a sixth part of the second moiety or a twelfth 
part of the whole property. Each of the four original 
holders consequently surrendered a corresponding frac- 
tion (one twenty-fourth) of his existing proprietary 
right. A further proportionate decrease in Shakespeare's 
holding was effected on February 21, 161 1-2, when a 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 305 

second actor of repute, William Ostler, the son-in-law 
of the actor and original sharer John Heminges, acquired 
a seventh part of the moiety, or a fourteenth part of the 
whole estate. Another new condition arose some six- 
teen months later. On June 29, 1613, the original 
Globe playhouse was burnt down, and a new building 
was erected on the same site at a cost of 1400/. To this 
outlay the shareholders were required to contribute in 
proportion to their holdings. But one of the proprietors, 
a man named John Witter, who had inherited the original 
interest of his dead father-in-law, the actor Phillips, was 
unable or decHned to meet this liability, and Heminges, 
then the company's business manager, seized the for- 
feited share. Heminges's holding thus became twice 
that of Shakespeare. No further reapportionment of 
the shares took place in Shakespeare's lifetime, so that 
his final interest in the Globe exceeded by very little a 
fourteenth part of the whole property.^ 

^ Shakespeare would appear to have retained to the end in addition 
to his original share his quarter of Kemp's original allotment, but the 
successive partitions reduced both portions of his early allotment in 
the same degree. The subsequent history of Shakespeare's and his 
partners' shares in the Globe are clearly traceable from documentary 
evidence. Nathan Field, the actor dramatist, has been wrongly claimed 
as a shareholder of the Globe after Shakespeare's death. He was clearly 
a ' hired ' member of the company for a few years, but probably retired 
in 1619, when, on Richard Burbage's death, Joseph Taylor, who succeeded 
to Burbage's chief r6les, was admitted also in a hired capacity in spite 
of earlier litigation with Heminges, the manager. Field had certainly 
withdrawn by 1621 (E. K. Chambers, in Mod. Language Rev. iv. 395). 
Neither Field at any time, nor Taylor at this period, was a 'housekeeper' 
or shareholder. But such a dignity was bestowed within a short period 
of Shakespeare's death on John Underwood, a young actor of promise, 
who received an eighth part of the subsidiary moiety. This share, along 
with an eighth share at the Blackfriars, Underwood bequeathed to his 
children by will dated October 4, 1624 (Malone, iii. 214; CoUier, p. 230; 
cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 313). After Underwood's admission the Globe 
property was described as consisting of sixteen shares, eight remaining 
in the Burbages' hands. The whole of the second moiety was soon 
acquired by Heminges and Condell. The latter died in 1627 and the 
former in 1630. Their two heirs, Heminges's son and Condell's widow, 
were credited in 1630 with owning respectively four shares apiece. (See 
documents printed in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 311.) There is reason to 
believe that it was to Heminges, the business man of the company and 
the last survivor of the original owners of the second moiety, that Shake- 
X • 



3o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare's pecuniary interest in the Blackfriars 
theatre was only created at a late period of his life, when 
Shake ^^^ active career was nearing its close, and his 
speare's full enjoyment of its benefit extended over 

theBkck- litt^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ fiv^ yesiTs (i 610-6). The 
friars from Blackfriars playhouse became in 1597 the sole 
^ ° ■ property of Richard Burbage, by inheritance 

from his father. Until 1608 the house was leased by 
Burbage to Henry Evans, the manager of the boys' com- 
pany which was known in Queen Elizabeth's reign as 
'Children of the Chapel Royal' and in the beginning of 
King James's reign as ' Children of the Queen's Revels. 
In the early autumn of 1608 Burbage recovered pos- 
session of the Blackfriars theatre owing to Evans's non- 
payment of rent under his lease. On August 9 of that 
year the great actor-owner divided this playhouse into 
seven shares, retaining one for himself, and allotting one 
each to Shakespeare, to his brother Cuthbert, to Hem- 
inges, Condell, and William Sly, his acting colleagues, 
while the seventh and last share was bestow^ed on Henry 
Evans, the dispossessed lessee. Until the close of the 
following year (1609) Evans's company of boy actors 
continued to occupy the Blackfriars stage intermittently, 
and Shakespeare and his six partners took no part in 
the management. It was only in January 16 10 that 

speare's holding, like that of Phillips, Ostler, and others, ultimately came. 
After Heminges's death in 1630 his four shares were disposed of by his 
son and heir, William Heminges; one was then divided between the 
actors, Taylor and Lowin, who acquired a second share from the Burbage 
moiety, which was then first encroached upon; the remaining three of 
Heminges's four shares passed to a third actor, John Shanks, who soon 
made them over under compulsion to three junior actors, Benfield, 
Swanston, and Pollard. About the same time Condell's widow parted 
with two of her four shares to Taylor and Lowin, who thus came to hold 
four shares between them. Richard Burbage had died in 1619 and 
Cuthbert Burbage in 1636. Their legatees — Richard's widow and the 
daughters of Cuthbert — retained between them, till the company dis- 
solved, seven shares, and Condell's widow two shares. The five actor- 
shareholders, Taylor, Lowin, Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard, outlived 
the demolition of the Globe in 1644 and were, together with the private 
persons who were legatees of the Burbages and of Condell, the last suc- 
cessors of Shakespeare and of the other original owners of the playhouse. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 307 

full control of the Blackfriars theatre was assumed by 
Shakespeare, Burbage, and their five colleagues. Thence- 
forth the company of the Globe regularly appeared there 
during the winter seasons, and occasionally at other 
times. Shakespeare's seventh share in the Blackfriars 
now entitled him to a seventh part of the receipts, but 
imposed as at the Globe a proportionate liabihty for the 
working expenses. "• During the last few years of his life 
Shakespeare thus enjoyed, in addition to his revenues as 
actor and dramatic author, an income as ' housekeeper ' or 
part proprietor of the two leading playhouses of the day. 
The first Globe theatre, a large and popular playhouse, 
accommodated some 1600 spectators, whose places cost 
them sums varying from a penny or twopence 
to half-a-crown. The higher priced seats were ings at the 

comparatively few, and the theatre was prob- Globe, 

1-1 1 J ^1 J i5gg-i6i3. 

ably closed on the average some 100 days a 

year, while the company was resting, whether voluntarily 

or compulsorily, or while it was touring the provinces. 

During the first years of the Globe's life the daily takings 

were not Ukely on a reasonable system of accountancy 

to exceed 15/., nor the receipts in gross to reach more 

than 3000^. a year.^ The working expenses, including 

^ There was no re-partition of the Blackfriars during Shakespeare's 
lifetime. But on Sly's early death (Aug. 13, 1608) his widow made over 
her husband's share to Burbage and he transferred it to the actor Wil- 
liam Ostler on his marriage to Heminges's daughter (May 20, 161 1). 
After Shakespeare's death John Underwood, a new actor, of youthful 
promise, was admitted (before 1624) as an eighth partner, and the pro- 
portional receipts and liabilities of each old proprietor were readjusted 
accordingly. Heminges, who lived till 1630, seems to have ultimately 
acquired four shares or half the whole, while the two Burbages and Con- 
dell's and Underwood's heirs retained one each. Of Heminges's four 
shares, two were after his death sold by his son William to the actors 
Taylor and Lowin respectively, and two to a third actor of a junior 
generation, John Shanks, who soon parted with them to the three players 
Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard. When the Blackfriars company was 
finally dissolved in the Civil Wars, Taylor and Lowin and these three 
actors held one moiety and the other moiety was equally shared by 
legatees of the two Burbages, of Condell, and of Underwood. 

2 Wlien at the end of the sixteenth century Philip Henslowe was 
managing the Rose and Newington theatres, both small houses, and was 
probably entitled to less than a half of the takings, he often received 



3o8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ground-rent, cost of properties, dramatists' and licen- 
sers' fees, actors' salaries, maintenance of the fabric, 
and the wages of attendants, might well absorb half the 
total receipts. On that supposition the residue to be 
divided among the shareholders would be no more than 
1500^. a year. When Shakespeare was in receipt of a 
tenth share of the profits he could hardly count on more 
than 150/. annually from that source. Later his share 
decreased to near a fourteenth, in conformity with the 
practice of extending the number of actor-housekeepers, 
but the increased prosperity of the playhouse would 
insure him against a diminution of profit and might 
lead to some increase. When the theatre was burnt 
down in 1613, Shakespeare's career was well-nigh ended. 
His contribution to the fund which the shareholders 

as his individual share some 3Z. to 4I. a performance at each house. On 
one occasion he pocketed as much as 61. ys. 8d. (Collier's Hist. iii. ; of. 
Dr. Wallace in Englische Studien, xliii. pp. 360 seq.). The average 
takings at the Fortune theatre, which was of the same size as the Globe 
but enjoyed less popularity, have been estimated at 12I. a day (Hens- 
lowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 135). It should, however, be pointed out that 
Henslowe's extant accounts which are at Dulwich are incomplete, and 
there is lack of agreement as to their interpretation {ibid. ii. pp. 1 10 seq. ; 
Dr. Wallace in Englische Skidien, xliii. pp. 357 seq., and E. K. Chambers 
in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 489 seq.). Malone reckoned the receipts at both 
the Globe and the Blackfriars early in the seventeenth century at no 
more than gl. a day ; but his calculation was based on a somewhat special 
set of accounts rendered for some five years (1628-34) subsequent to 
Shakespeare's death to Sir Henry Herbert, the licenser of plays, who was 
allowed an annual 'benefit' at each theatre (Malone's Variorum, iii. 175 
seq.). Herbert reckoned his ten 'benefits' during the five years in ques- 
tion at sums varying between lyl. 10s. and i/. 5^., but Herbert's 'bene- 
fits' involved conditions which were never quite normal. In Actors' 
Remonstrance (1643) the author, who clearly drew upon a long experience, 
vaguely estimated the yield of a share of each theatrical 'housekeeper' 
who 'grew wealthy by actors' endeavours' at from 'ten to thirty shil- 
lings' for each performance, or from some 100/. to 300Z. a year. (See 
Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage, 1869, p. 262.) It would seem that 
shareholders enjoyed some minor perquisites at the theatre. Profits, 
which were sometimes made in the playhouse on wine, beer, ale, or 
tobacco, were reckoned among the assets of the 'housekeepers' {Neiv 
Shakspere Society Transactions, 1887-92, p. 271). The costumes, which 
at the chief Elizabethan theatres involved a heavy expense, were sold 
from time to time to smaller houses and often fetched as secondhand 
apparel substantial sums. (See Shakespeare Jahrbuch, igio, xlvi. 239- 
240.) 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 309 

raised to defray the cost of rebuilding apparently ex- 
ceeded 100/. The profits of the new playhouse some- 
what exceeded those of the old, but Shakespeare lived 
Ni^ttle more than a year after the new playhouse opened 
arid there was barely time for him to benefit conspicu- 
ously by the improved conditions. His net income from 
the Globe during his last year was probably not greatly 
/"m excess of former days. 

The rates of admission for the audience at the Black- 
friars were rather higher than at the Globe, but the house 
held only half the number of spectators. The 
dividend which Shakespeare's seventh share ings at the 
earned there was consequently no larger than Biackfnars 

, 1 • 1 r 11 1 1 from 1608. 

that which a fourteenth share earned at the 
Globe. Thus a second sum ■ of 1 50/. probably reached 
him from the younger theatre. On such an assumption 
Shakespeare, as 'housekeeper' or part proprietor of both 
playhouses, received, while the two were in active work, 
an aggregate yearly sum of some 300/., equivalent to 
1500/. in modern currency. In the play of 'Hamlet' 
both ' a share ' and ' a half share ' of ' a fellowship in a cry 
of players' are described as assets of enviable value 
(in. ii. 294-6). In view of the affluence popularly im- 
puted to shareowning actors and the wealth known from 
their extant wills to have been left by them at death,^ 
Hamlet's description would hardly justify a lower valu- 
ation of Shakespeare's holdings than the one which is 
here suggested. 

No means is at hand to determine more positively the 
precise pecuniary returns which Shakespeare's The pecu- 
theatrical shares yielded. Litigation among prog'tsof 
shareholders was frequent and estimates of the Shake- 
value of their shares have come to Hght in the theatrical 
archives of legal controversy, but the figures are shares. 
too speculative and too conflicting to be very serviceable.^ 

^ See p. 493 infra. 

2 Very numerous depositions and other documents connected with 
theatrical litigation in Shakespeare's epoch are in the Public Record 



3IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The circumstances in which a share in the Globe (of 
the same dimensions as Shakespeare's) which was 
Share- Originally owned by Augustine Phillips, was ac- 
hoiders' quired in 1 6 14 by Heminges led to a belated suit 
law-suits. in 1 6 19 for its recovery by Phillips's son-in-law, 
John Witter. Witter, whose suit was dismissed as 
frivolous and whose testimony carried no weight with the 
Court, reckoned that before the fire of 1613 the share's 
annual income brought a modest return of between 30/. 

Ofl&ce. Such as have been examined throw more or less light on the 
financial side of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical enterprise. The 
earliest known records of theatrical litigation — in which James Burbage 
was involved at The Theatre late in the sixteenth century — were first 
published by J. P. Collier in Lives of Actors, 1846; and Collier's docu- 
ments were re-edited by Halliwell-Phillipps and again edited and supple- 
mented by Mrs. Stopes in her Burbage and Shakespeare's Stage and by Dr. 
Wallace in his First London Theatre. But it is only theatrical litigation 
of a somewhat late date which is strictly relevant to a discussion of 
Shakespeare's theatrical earnings. Investigation in this direction has 
been active very recently, but its results are scattered and not easUy 
accessible. It may be convenient here to tabulate bibliographically the 
recent publications (within my knowledge) of the legal records of the- 
atrical litigation which bear in any degree on Shakespeare's financial 
experience : 

I.-III. Three lawsuits among persons claiming financial interests in 
the Blackfriars Theatre just before Shakespeare's association with it, 
discovered by James Greenstreet in the Public Record Office, and printed 
in full in Fleay's History of the Stage, 1887. I. Clifton v. Robinson, 
Evans and others in the Star Chamber, 1601 (Fleay, pp. 127-33). H- 
Evans v. Kirkham and III. Kirkham v. Painton in the Court of Chancery, 
161 2 {ib. 208-251). 

IV .-VII. Four interesting cases to which Shakespeare's fellow- 
shareholders were parties in the early years of the seventeenth century 
discovered by Dr. C. W. Wallace ; they supply various ex parte estimates 
of the pecuniary value of theatrical shares practically identical with 
Shakespeare's. IV. Robert Keyzar v. John Heminges, Henry Condell, 
and others in the Court of Requests, 1608, described by Dr. Wallace in 
the Century Magazine for September 19 10; all the documents printed 
in Nebraska University Studies for that year. V. Mrs. Thomasina Ostler 
v. John Heminges (her father) in the Court of King's Bench, 1614-5, 
described by Dr. Wallace in The Times (London) for Oct. 2 and Oct. 4, 
1909; the only document found here, the plaintiff's long plea, printed 
by Dr. Wallace in extenso in the original Latin in a privately-circulated 
pamphlet. VI. John Witter v. John Heminges and Henry Condell, in the 
Court of Requests, 1619, described in the Century Magazine for August 
1910, of special interest owing to the many documents concerning the 
early financial organisation of the Globe theatre which were exhibited 
by John Heminges, who was both manager of the theatre and the cus- 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 311 

and 40/. a year ; he vaguely admitted that after the fire 
the revenue had vastly increased. Meanwhile in October 
1 6 14 a different htigant, who claimed a year's profits on 
another and a somewhat smaller share in the Globe, 
valued the alleged debt after the fire at 300/. The 
claimant, Heminges's daughter, was widow of the 
actor-shareholder William Ostler, whose dividend, she 
alleged, was wrongly detained by her father.^ Mrs. 
Ostler's suit also throws a flicker of light on the profits 
of the Blackfriars house at a time when Shakespeare was 
a part proprietor. She claimed of her father a second 
sum of 300/., being her estimate of the previous year's 
dividend on her husband's seventh share at the Black- 
friars. Shakespeare's proportionate interest in the two 
theatres was very little larger than Ostler's, so that if 

todian of its archives. VII. John Heminges v. Joseph Taylor in i6io 
for the recovery of 11/. for theatrical costume, sold by Heminges to the 
Duke of York's company of which Taylor the defendant was a member 
{Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 19 10, xlvi. 239-40). 

VIII. A financial sharing dispute before the Lord Chamberlain in 
1635 among Shakespeare's actor-successors at the Globe and Blackfriars 
which is of great importance; printed from the Lord Chamberlain's 
archives by HaUiwell-Phillipps first in his Illustrations, 1873, and again 
in his Outlines, i. 312-9. 

IX.-XII. Four theatrical lawsuits touching the affairs of theatres 
of Shakespeare's time other than the Globe or Blackfriars, and furnish- 
ing collateral information. IX. Robert Shaw afid four other actors v. 
Francis Latigley, owner of the Swan theatre, in the Court of Requests, 
1597-8 (documents summarised by Mrs. Stopes in The Stage, Jan. 6, 
1910, and printed in full in her Burbage and Shakespeare's Stage, 1913, 
pp. 177-83; also printed with much comment by Dr. Wallace in Eng- 
lische Sludien, 1910-1, xliii. 340-95). X. George Aitdroives v. Martin 
Slater and other persons interested in the Whitefriars theatre, in the Court 
of Chancery, 1609 (documents printed by James Greenstreet in New 
Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1887-92, pp. 269-84). XL Woodford 
v. Holland, concerning the ownership of a share in the Red Bull theatre, 
in the Court of Requests in 161 3 (documents discovered by James Green- 
street and printed in Fleay's History of the Stage, pp. 194-9). XII. A 
suit in the Court of Chancery, 1623-6, to which actors of the Queen's 
company at the Cockpit in Drury Lane were parties among themselves, 
a main issue being the company's pecuniary obligations to the widow of 
a prominent member, Thomas Greene, who died in 161 2 (the documents 
discovered by James Greenstreet and printed in full in Fleay's History 
of the Stage, pp. 270-297). 

* Ostler, who died in 1614, had been granted both a fourteenth share 
of the Globe and a seventh share of the Blackfriars. 



312 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Mrs. Ostler's estimates were accurate, Shakespeare's in- 
come from the playhouses in 1614 would have slightly 
exceeded 600^, But Mrs. Ostler's claim was probably 
as much in excess of the truth as Witter's random valu- 
ation fell below it.-"- 

Meanwhile, in 1610, a third litigant, a goldsmith of the 
City of London, Robert Keysar, who engaged from 1606 
onwards in theatrical management,^ propounded another 
estimate of the value of a share in the Blackfriars while 
Shakespeare was one of the owners. Keysar in February 
1 6 10 brought an action for 1000^. damages against Shake- 
speare's company on the ground that that corporation 
had unjustly seized a sixth share in the Blackfriars 
theatre which he had purchased for 100/. about 1606, 
when Henry Evans was the lessee and before Burbage 
and his friends had taken possession. Keysar generously 
estimated the profit which Shakespeare and his partners 
divided at the Blackfriars at 1500/. for half a year or 
over 200/. on each share.^ 

^ Mrs. Ostler, of whose suit only her ex parte plea has come to light, 
seemed in her evidence to treat the capital value of her husband's shares 
as worth no more than a single year's dividends. Such a valuation of 
theatrical property would appear to be generally accepted at the time. 
In 1608 an investor in a share at the Whitefriars theatre who anticipated 
an annual return of 100/. was offered the share at 90^. and finally bought 
it for 70Z. {New Shak. Soc. Trans. 1887-92, p. 299). A second share in 
the same theatre changed hands at the like period for 100^. At a later 
date, in 1633, three actors bought three shares in the Globe and two in 
the Blackfriars for a total sum of 506/. The capital value of shares was 
doubtless influenced in part by the number of years which the lease of 
the site of the theatre concerned had yet to run when the shares were 
sold. The Whitefriars lease was short, and had in 1608 only five years 
to run, and the Globe lease in 1633, although the original term had been 
extended, was approaching extinction. 

^ To Keysar the publisher of Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the 
Burning Pestle dedicated the play in 1613. (See E. K. Chambers, in 
Mod. Lang. Rev. 1909, iv. 160 seq.) 

^ Keysar maintained not only that he had paid John Marston, pre- 
sumably the dramatist, 100/. for a sixth share in 1606, but that he had 
advanced between that year and 1608 500/. for the training of the boy 
actors who were located at the time at the Blackfriars. His further 
declaration that the new management, which consisted of Shakespeare and 
six other actors, had in 1608 offered him 400Z. for his holding was warmly 
denied by them. The result of Keysar's claim has not yet come to light. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 313 

There is no wide discrepancy between Keysar's and 
Mrs. Ostler's independent reckonings of the profits at the 
Blackfriars. Yet the evidence of both Htigants is dis- 
credited by a number of facts which are accessible outside 
the records of the law courts. The problem must seek its 
solution in a more comprehensive and less interested sur- 
vey of theatrical enterprise than that which ex parte state- 
ments in legal disputes are likely to furnish. It is only safe 
to rely on the dispassionate evidence of dramatic history. 

Shakespeare's professional income was never derived 
exclusively from his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars 
theatres after 1599. Earlier sources of revenue increased 
remained open to him and yielded richer returns fees from 
than before. Performances of his company at under 
Court proved increasingly profitable. The James i. 
dramatist and his colleagues had become on James I's 
succession 'the servants of the King,' and their services 
were each year enlisted by the sovereign at least three 
times as often as in the old reign. Actors in the royal 
presence at the palaces in or near London still received 
as a rule 10/. for each play in agreement with Queen 
Elizabeth's tariff ; but Prince Henry and the royal chil- 
dren made additional and independent calls on the 
players' activities, and while the princes' fee was a third 
less than the King's, the company's total receipts from 
the royal patronage thereby rose. In 1603 a special 
performance of the company before James I while the 
King was the Earl of Pembroke's guest out of London — 
at Wilton — brought the enhanced remuneration of 
30/. For Court performances in London alone Shake- 
speare and his colleagues received for the six years 
(from 1608-9 to 1613-4) a total sum of 912Z. 12^. Sd. or 
over 160/. a year. Shakespeare's proportional share in 
these receipts may be reckoned as adding to his income 
an average sum of at least 15/. a year. It is to be remem- 
bered, too, that Shakespeare and his acting colleagues 
came on the accession of James I under the direct patron- 
age of the Kjng, and were thenceforth, in accordance with 



314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

a precedent set by Queen Elizabeth, reckoned among 
officers of the royal household ('grooms of the chamber'). 
The rank entitled them individually, and irrespectively 
of professional fees for acting services, to a regular stipend 
of between 2I. and 3/. a year, with various perquisites 
and gratuities, which were at times substantial.^ 

Shakespeare's remuneration as both actor and dram- 
matist between 1599 and 161 1 was also on the upward 
Salary grade. The sharers or housekeepers were wont 
as actor. ^q draw for regular histrionic service a fixed 
salary, which was at this epoch reaching its maximum of 
180/. a year. Actor-shareholders were also allowed to 
take apprentices or pupils with whom they received 
premiums. Among Shakespeare's colleagues Richard 
Burbage and Augustine Phillips are both known to have 
had articled pupils.^ 

The fees paid to dramatists for plays also rose rapidly 
in the early years of the seventeenth century, while the 
taterm- valuc of the author's 'benefits' grew con- 
come as spicuously with the growing vogue of the 
ramatist. ^j^gg^^-j-g Additional payments on an enhanced 
scale were made, too, for revisions of old dramas on their 
revival in the theatres. Playwrights of secondary rank 
came to receive a fixed yearly stipend from the company, 
but the leading dramatists apparently continued to draw 
remuneration piece by piece. The exceptional popularity 
of Shakespeare's work after 1599 gave him the full advan- 
tage of higher rates of pecuniary reward in all directions. 
The seventeen plays which were produced by him be- 
tween that year and the close of his professional career 
could not have brought him less on an average than 25/. 
each or some 400/. in all — nearly 40/. a year, while the 
'benefits' and other supplementary dues of authorship 
may be presumed to have added a further 20I? . 

Thus Shakespeare, during fourteen or fifteen years of 

^ See p. 382 infra. ^ Collier's History, iii. 434. 

^ In 1613 Robert Daborne, a playwright of insignificant reputation, 
charged for a drama as much as 2$l. (Alleyn Papers, ed. Collier, p. 65). 
A little later (in 1635) a hackwriter, Richard Brome, one of Ben Jonson's 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 315 

the later period of his life, must have been earning at the 
theatre a sum well exceeding 700/. a year in 
money of the time. With so large a profes- speare's 
sional income he could easily, with good final in- 

come 

management, have completed those purchases 
of houses and land at Stratford on which he laid out, 
between 1599 and 1613, a total sum of 970/., or an 
annual average of 70/. These properties, it must be 
remembered, represented investments, and he drew rent 
from most of them. Like the other well-to-do house- 
holders or landowners at Stratford, he traded, too, in 
agricultural produce. There is nothing inherently im- 
probable in the statement of John Ward, the seventeenth- 
century vicar of Stratford, that the dramatist, in his last 
years, ' spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have 
heard,' although we may reasonably make allowance for 
some exaggeration in the round figures. Shakespeare's 
comparative affluence presents no feature which is un- 
matched in the current experience of the profession.^ 
Gifts from patrons may have continued occasionally to 
augment his resources, but his wealth can be satisfactorily 
assigned to better attested agencies. There is no ground 
for treating it as of mysterious origin. 

Between 1599 and 161 1, while London remained 
Shakespeare's chief home and his financial Domestic 
position was assured, he built up at Stratford incident, 
the large landed estate which his purchase of ^ °^~ ' 
New Place had inaugurated. Early in the new century 

'servants' or disciples, contracted to write three plays a year for three 
years for the Salisbury Court theatre at 155. a week together with 
author's 'benefits' on the production of each work. In 1638 Brome 
was offered, for a further term of seven years, an increased salary of 
20s. a week with 'benefits,' but a rival theatre, the Cockpit, made a more 
generous proposal, which the dramatist accepted instead. A dramatist 
of Brome's slender repute may thus be credited with earning as a play- 
wright at his prime some 80/. a year. In the Actors' Remonstrance, 1643, 
'our ablest ordinarie poets' were credited with large incomes from their 
'annual stipends and beneficial second days' (Hazlitt's English Drama, 
1869, p. 264). 

^ For a comparison of Shakespeare's estate at death with that of other 
actors and theatrical shareholders of the day, see p. 493. 



3l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the death of his parents made some addition to his interest 
in house property. In 1601 his father died, being buried 
on September 8. In spite of the decay of his fortune the 
elder Shakespeare retained much local esteem. Within 
a few months of the end the Town Council accepted from 
him suggestions for its conduct of a lawsuit which the lord 
of the manor, Sir Edward Greville, was bringing against 
the bailiff and burgesses. Sir Edward made claim to a 
toll on wheat and barley entering the town.^ The old 
man apparently left no will, and the poet, as the eldest 
son, inherited, subject to the widow's dower, the houses in 
Henley Street, the only portion of the property of the 
elder Shakespeare or of his wife which had not been alien- 
ated to creditors. Shakespeare's mother continued to re- 
side in one of the Henley Street houses till her death. 
She survived her husband for just seven years. She 
was buried in Stratford churchyard on September 9, 
1608. The dramatist's presence in the town on the sad 
occasion of his mother's funeral enabled him to pay a 
valued compliment to the bailiff of the town, one Henry 
Walker, a mercer of High Street, to whom a son had just 
been born. The dramatist stood godfather to the boy, 
who was baptised at the parish church, in the name of 
William, on October 19, 1608.^ 

The Henley Street tenement where Shakespeare's 
mother died remained by his indulgence the home of 
his married sister, Mrs. Joan Hart, and of her family. 
Whether his sister paid him rent is uncertain. But through 
the last years of his life the dramatist enjoyed a modest 

^ Stratford-on-Avon Corporation Records, Miscell. Documents, vol. v. 
No. 20. 

^ See p. 460 infra. Henry Walker was very active in municipal 
affairs, being chamberlain in 1603 and becoming an alderman soon after. 
He is to be distinguished from the Henry Walker 'citizen and minstrel 
of London' of whom Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars in 1613. 
(See pp. 456-7 and 489 infra.) William Walker, son of the Stratford 
Henry Walker and Shakespeare's godson, proved, like his father, a useful 
citizen of Stratford, serving as chamberlain of the borough in 1644-5. 
William Walker, 'gent.,' his wife Frances, and many children were resi- 
dent in the town in 1657. He was buried at Stratford in March 1679-80. 
(Cf. Halliwell, Cal. Stratford Records, 129, 442, 465.) 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 317 

return from a small part of the Henley Street property. 
A barn stood in the grounds behind the residence, and this 
Shakespeare leased to a substantial neighbour, Robert 
Johnson, keeper of the White Lion Inn. On the inn- 
keeper's death in 161 1 the unexpired lease of the build- 
ing was valued at 2ol} 

On May i, 1602, Shakespeare purchased for the sub- 
stantial sum of 320/. a large plot of 107 acres (or 'four 
yard-lands') of arable land near the town. Formation 
The transaction brought the dramatist into of the 
close relation with men of wealth and local stratford, 
influence. The vendors were William Combe 1601-10. 
and his nephew John Combe, members of a family which 
had settled at Stratford some sixty years before, and 
owned much land near the town and elsewhere. Wil- 
liam Combe had entered the Middle Temple on October 
19, 1571,^ and long retained a set of chambers there; 
but his career was identified with the city of Warwick, 
where he acquired a large property, and was held in high 
esteem.^ He also owned the important estate of Alve- 
church Park in Worcestershire. In the conveyance of 
the land to Shakespeare in 1602 he is described as 'of 
Warwick in the county of Warwick, esquire.' ^ His 
nephew John Combe of 'Old Stratford in the county 
aforesaid, gentleman,' the joint vendor of the property, 

^ The inventory of Robert Johnson's goods is described from the 
Stratford records by Mr. Richard Savage in the Athenceum, August 29, 
1908. 

'^Middle Temple Records — Minutes of Parliament, i. 181, where 
William Combe is described as ' second son of John Combe late of Strat- 
ford upon Avon esquire, deceased.' 

^ Black Book of Warwick, ed. Kemp, pp. 406-8. 

^William Combe of Warwick married after 1596 Jane widow of Sir 
John Puckering, lord keeper of the great seal (or lord chancellor), but 
left no issue. He was M.P. for the town of Warwick in 1592-3 and 
for the county in 1597, was Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1608 and died two 
years later. His will, which was signed on Sept. 29, 1610, was proved on 
June I, 1611. The original is preserved at Somerset House (P.C.C. 52 
Wood). Most of his property was left to his widow, 'Lady Jane Pucker- 
ing.' His executors were his 'cosins John Combe and William Combe of 
Stratforde, esquires ' [respectively his nephew and grand-nephew] but 
probate was only granted to William, son of his nephew Thomas. He 



3l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

was a wealthy Stratford resident, with whom Shakespeare 
was soon to enjoy much personal intercourse. The 
conveyance of the Combes' land was delivered, in the 
poet's absence, to his brother Gilbert, 'to the use of the 
within named William Shakespeare,' in the presence of 
the poet's friends Anthony and John Nash and three 
other neighbours.^ A less imposing purchase quickly 
followed. On September 28, 1602, at a court baron of 
the manor of Rowington, one Walter Getley transferred 
to the poet a cottage and a quarter of an acre of land 
which were situated at Chapel Lane (then called 
'Walkers Streete alias Dead Lane') adjoining the lower 
grounds of his residence of New Place. These properties 
were held practically in fee-simple at the annual rental 
of 2s. 6d. The Manor of Rowington, of which numerous 
other Shakespeares were tenants, had been granted by 
Queen Elizabeth to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, 
the Earl of Leicester's brother, who held it until his death 
in 1589. The Earl's widow and third wife, Anne Count- 
ess of Warwick, remained Lady of the Manor until her 
death on February 9, 1603-4, when the property fully 
reverted to the Crown. The Countess of Warwick was 
thus Lady of the Manor when Shakespeare purchased 
the property in Chapel Lane. It appears from the 
manorial roll that Shakespeare did not attend the 
manorial court held at Rowington on the day fixed for 
the transfer of the property, and it was consequently 

left loZ. to the poor of Stratford, as well as 20I. to the poor of Warwick. 
The will of his nephew Thomas Combe, John Combe's brother (P.C.C. 
Dorset 13), establishes the relationship between William Combe of War- 
wick and John Combe of Stratford. Thomas Combe who predeceased 
his 'good uncle William Combe' in Jan. 1608-9, made him in the first 
draft of his will an executor along with his brother John and his son 
William. William Combe of Warwick is invariably confused with his 
grand-nephew and Thomas Combe's son William, who, born at Stratford 
in 1586, was closely associated with Shakespeare after 1614. See p. 
472 infra. The dramatist was not brought into personal relation with 
the elder William Combe, save over the sales of land in 1602 and subse- 
quent years. 

1 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19. The original deed is at Shakespeare's 
Birthplace {Cat. No. 158). 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 319 

stipulated then that the estate should remain in the 
hands of the Lady of the Manor until the dramatist 
completed the purchase in person. At a later period he 
made the brief journey and was admitted to the copy- 
hold, settling the remainder on his two daughters in fee, 
although the manorial custom (as it proved) only allowed 
the elder child to succeed to the property.^ Subsequently 
Shakespeare negotiated a further purchase from the two 
Combes of 20 acres of meadow or pasture land, to add 
to the 107 of arable land which he had acquired of the 
same owners in 1602. In April 1610 he paid to the 
vendors, the uncle and nephew William and John Combe, 
a fine of 100/. in respect of the two purchases.^ 

Shakespeare had thus become a substantial landowner 
in his native place. A yet larger investment was mean- 
while in contemplation. As early as 1598 ^j^^ 
Abraham Sturley, the Stratford citizen who Stratford 
deeply interested himself in Shakespeare's ^^^^^^' 
material fortunes, had suggested that the dramatist 
should purchase the tithes of Stratford. The advice 
was taken after an interval of seven years. On July 24, 
1605, Shakespeare bought for 440I. of Ralph Huband, 
owner of the well-known Warwickshire manor of Ipsley, 
a lease of a 'moiety' of 'the tithes' of Stratford, Old 
Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. Although loosely 
called a 'moiety,' Shakespeare's share of 'the tithes' 
— a miscellaneous property including houses, cottages, 
and fields, — scarcely amounted to a quarter. The 
whole had formed part of the forfeited ecclesiastical 
estate of The College, and had been leased by the officers 
of that institution in 1544 for a term of ninety- two years 
to one WilHam Barker, of Sonning, Berkshire. On the 
dissolution of The College by act of parhament in 1553, 



1 See p. 488 infra. Cf. Halliwell-PhUlipps, ii. 19 ; Dr. C. W. Wallace 
in The Times, May 8, 1915, and Mrs. Stopes in The Athenaum, June 5, 
1915- 

2 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 25 (from P.R.O. Feet of Fines, Warwick Trin. 
8 Jac. I, 1610, Skin 15). 



320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the property was devised to the Stratford Corporation 
on the expiration of the lease. Barker soon sub-leased 
the tithe estate, and when Shakespeare acquired his 
'moiety' the property was divided among over thirty 
local owners in allotments of various dimensions. Shake- 
speare's holding, of which the ninety-two years' lease 
had thirty-one years to run, had come into the hands of 
the vendor Ralph Huband on the recent death of his 
brother Sir John Huband, who had acquired it of Barker. 
It far exceeded in value all the other shares save one, and 
it was estimated to yield 60/. a year. But all the shares 
were heavily encumbered. Shakespeare's 'moiety' was 
subject to a rent of 17/. to the corporation, who were the 
reversionary owners of the tithe-estate, while John 
Barker, heir of the first lessee, claimed dues of 5Z. a year. 
According to the harsh terms of the sub-leases, any 
failure on the part of any of the sub-lessees to pay Barker 
a prescribed contribution forfeited to him the entire 
property. The investment thus brought Shakespeare, 
under the most favourable circumstances, no higher 
income than 38/., and the refusal of his fellow-share- 
holders to acknowledge the full extent of their liability 
to Barker, constantly imperilled all the poet's rights. 
If he wished to retain his interest in the event of the 
others' default, he was required to pay their debts. 
After 1609 Shakespeare entered a suit in the Court 
of Chancery to determine the exact responsibilities of 
all the tithe-owners. With him were joined Richard 
Lane, of Alveston on the Avon near Stratford, Thomas 
Greene, the lawyer who was town clerk of Stratford 
from 1 6 10 to 161 7 and claimed to be the dramatist's 
cousin,^ and the rest of the more responsible sharers. 
In 161 2 Shakespeare and his friends presented a bill of 
complaint to Lord-Chancellor Ellesmere. The judg- 
ment has not come to Hght, but an accommodation, 
whereby the poet was fully secured in his holding, 
was clearly reached. His investment in the tithes 

1 See pp. 473-4 infra. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FINANCIAL RESOURCES 321 

proved fruitful of legal embarrassments, but the property 
descended to his heirs.'- 

Shakespeare inherited his father's love of litigation, 
and stood rigorously by his rights in all his business 
relations . In M arch 1 600 ' William Shackspere ' Recovery 
sued John Clayton ' Yeoman ' of Wellington in of small 
Bedfordshire, in the Court of Queen's Bench, for ^ ^^' 
the repayment of a debt of 7/.^ The plaintiff's attorney 
was Thomas Awdley, and on the failure of the defendant 
to put in an appearance, judgment was given for the 
plaintiff with 20s. costs. There is nothing to identify 
John Clayton's creditor with the dramatist, nor is it easy 
to explain why he should have lent money to a Bed- 
fordshire yeoman.^ It is beyond question however that 
at Stratford Shakespeare, like many of his fellow-towns- 
men, was a frequent suitor in the local court of record. 
While he was not averse from advancing money to im- 
pecunious neighbours, he was punctual and pertinacious 
in demands for repayment. In July 1604 he sued for 
debt in the local court Philip Rogers, the apothecary of 
the town. Like most of the larger householders at Strat- 
ford, Shakespeare found means of evading the restrictions 
on the domestic manufacture of malt which proved 
efficacious in the case of the humbler townsfolk. Afflu- 
ent residents indeed often rendered their poorer neigh- 
bours the service of selling to them their superfluities. 
In such conditions Shakespeare's servants delivered to 
the apothecary Rogers at fortnightly intervals between 
March 27 and May 30, 1604, twenty pecks or five bushels 
of malt in varying small quantities for domestic use. 
The supply was valued at iZ. 19^. lod. On June 25 the 

1 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 19 seq. ; Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environ- 
ment, 82-4. 

2 The record is in the Public Record Office (Coram Rege Roll, Easter 
42 Eliz. No. 1 36 1, Mem. 293). Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 185, mentions the 
litigation without giving any authority. I owe the clue to the kindness 
of Mrs. Stopes. 

^ Shakespeare's granddaughter, Lady Bernard, in her will claimed 
as her 'cousin' a Bedfordshire 'gent.,' 'Thomas Welles, of Carleton' 
in that county, but there is no clue to the kinship; see p. 513. 



322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

apothecary, who was usually in pecuniary difficulties, 
borrowed 2S. of Shakespeare's household. Later in the 
summer he repaid 6^. and in Michaelmas term the 
dramatist sued him for the balance of the account il. 
155. lod} During 1608 and 1609 he was at law with 
another fellow-townsman, John Addenbroke. On Feb- 
ruary 15, 1609, the dramatist, who appears to have been 
legally represented on this occasion by his kinsman, 
Thomas Greene,^ obtained judgment from a jury against 
Addenbroke for the payment of 61., with i/. 55. costs, 
but Addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved 
barren. Shakespeare avenged himself by proceeding 
against Thomas Horneby, who had acted as the abscond- 
ing debtor's bail.^ Horneby had succeeded his father 
Richard Horneby on his death in 1606 as a master black- 
smith in Henley Street, and was one of the smaller sharers 
in the tithes. The family forge lay near Shakespeare's 
Birthplace. Plaintiff and defendant in this last prose- 
cution had been playmates in childhood and they had 
some common interests in adult life. But litigation 
among the residents of Stratford showed scant regard 
for social ties, and in his handling of practical affairs 
Shakespeare caught the prevailing spirit of rigour. 

^ The Latin statement of claim — ' Shexpere versus Rogers ' — which 
was filed by Shakespeare's attorney William Tetherton, is exhibited in 
Shakespeare's Birthplace. (See Catalogue, No. 114.) There is no clue 
to any later stage of the suit, at the hearing of which Shakespeare was 
disabled by contemporary procedure from giving evidence on his own 
behalf. Similar actions were taken against local purchasers of small 
quantities of malt during the period by Shakespeare's wealthy local 
friends, Mr. John Combe, Mr. John Sadler, Mr. Anthony Nash and 
others. The grounds on which Shakespeare's identification with Rogers's 
creditor has been questioned are fallacious. (See Mrs. Stopes's Shake- 
speare's Family, p. 121; The Times, May 15, 1915; and The Times 
Literary Supplement, May 27, 1915.) Philip Rogers, the apothecary, 
was something of a professional student. In the same year as Shake- 
speare sued him, he sued a fellow-townsman, Valentine Palmes, or 
Palmer, for detaining a copy of Gale's Certain Workes of Chirurgery, 
which Rogers valued at 10s. 6d. Cf. Halliwell's Cal. Stratford Records, 
237, 316, 365; Mrs. Stopes's Shakespeare's Environment, 57. 

2 See pp. 473-4 and n. 

2 Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80, where all the extant documents in 
the archives of the Stratford Court bearing on the suits against both 
Rogers and Addenbroke are printed in full. 



XVI 

MATURITY OF GENIUS 

With an inconsistency that is more apparent than real, 
the astute business transactions of these years (1597- 
161 1) synchronise with the production of Ljterary 
Shakespeare's noblest literary work — of his work in 
most sustained and serious efforts in comedy, ^^^^' 
tragedy, and romance. In 1599, after abandoning Eng- 
Hsh history with 'Henry V,' he addressed himself to the 
composition of his three most perfect essays in romantic 
comedy — ' Much Ado about Nothing,' 'As You Like It,' 
and 'Twelfth Night.' There is every likeKhood that 
all three were quickly drafted within the year. The 
component parts of the trilogy are closely hnked one 
to another in manner of construction. In each play 
Shakespeare works over a more or less serious poetic 
romance by another hand and with the romantic theme 
he interweaves original episodes of genial irony or broad 
comedy which are convincingly interpreted by characters 
wholly of his own invention. Much penetrating reflec- 
tion on grave ethical issues is fused with the spirited 
portrayal of varied comic phases of humanity. In all 
three comedies, moreover, the dramatist presents youth- 
ful womanhood in the fascinating guise which is instinct 
at once with gaiety and tenderness; while the plays are 
interspersed with melodious songs which enrich the 
dominant note of harmony. To this versatile trilogy 
there attaches an equable charm which is scarcely rivalled 
elsewhere in Shakespearean drama. The christening of 
each piece — 'Much Ado about Nothing,' 'As You 
Like It,' 'Twelfth Night' — seems to exhibit the author 

323 



324 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

in a peculiarly buoyant vein. Although proverbial and 
disjointed phrases often served at the time as titles of 
drama, it is not easy to parallel the lack of obvious 
relevance in the name of 'Twelfth Night' or the merely 
ironic pertinence of 'Much Ado about Nothing' or the 
careless insolence of the phrase 'As You Like It,' which 
is re-echoed in 'What You Will,' the alternative desig- 
nation of 'Twelfth Night.' 

'Much Ado' was probably the earhest of the three 
pieces and may well have been written in the early sum- 
'Much Ado ^^^ of 1599- The sombre romance of Hero and 
about ^ Claudio, which is the main theme, was of 
°* ^^^' Italian origin. The story, before Shakespeare 
handled it, had passed from foreign into English liter- 
ature, and had been turned to theatrical uses in England. 
Bandello, to whose work Shakespeare and contem- 
porary dramatists made very frequent recourse, first 
narrated at length in his 'Novelle' (No. xxii.) the sad 
experiences of the slandered heroine, whom he christened 
Fenicia, and Bandello's story was translated into French 
rpj^g in Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques.' Mean- 

itaiian while Ariosto grafted the tale on his epic of 
'Orlando Furioso' (canto v), christening the 
injured bride Ginevra and her afhanced lover Ariodante. 
While Shakespeare was still a youth at Stratford-on- 
Avon, Ariosto's version was dramatised in English. Ac- 
cording to the accounts of the Court revels, 'A Historie 
of Ariodante and Ginevra' was shown 'before her Majestic 
on Shrove Tuesdaie [Feb. 12] at night' in 1583, the actors 
being boy-scholars of Merchant Taylors' School, under 
the direction of their capable headmaster, Richard 
Mulcaster.^ In 1591, moreover, Ariosto's account was 
anglicised by Sir John Harington in his spirited trans- 
lation of 'Orlando Furioso,' and Spenser wrought a 

■ ^ This dramatised 'Historic' has not survived in print or manuscript. 
Cf. Wallace, Evolution of the English Drama, p. 209 ; Cunningham's 
Revels (Shakespeare Society), p. 177; Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, 
182 1, iii. 406. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 325 

variation of Ariosto's rendering of the tale into his 
'Faerie Queene/ renaming the heroine Claribell (Bk. II. 
canto iv.). To one or other of the many Enghsh adap- 
tations of Ariosto Shakespeare may ^have owed some 
stimulus, but he drew substantial aid alone from Bandello 
or from his French translator. All the serious episodes 
of the play come from the Italian novel. 

Yet it was not the wrongs of the Italian heroine nor 
the villainy of her enemies which gave Shakespeare's 
genius in 'Much Ado' its chief opportunity. 
The drama owes its life to his creation of two speare^s 
subsidiary threads of comic interest — the bril- embellish- 

merits. 

liant encounters of Benedick and Beatrice, and 
the blunders of the watchmen Dogberry and Verges, who 
are very plausible caricatures of Elizabethan constables. 
All these characters won from the first triumphant 
success on the stage. The popular comic actor WilKam 
Kemp created the role of Dogberry before he left the 
newly opened Globe theatre, while Richard Cowley, a 
comedian of repute, appeared as Verges. In the early 
editions — in both the Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 
1623 — these actors' names are prefixed by a copyist's 
error to some of the speeches allotted to the two char- 
acters (act IV. scene ii.). 

'As You Like It,' which quickly followed 'Much Ado' 
in the autumn of 1599, is a dramatic adaptation of Thomas 
Lodge's pastoral romance 'Rosalynde, Euphues 'As You 
Golden Legacie' (1590), which, although of Like it.' 
English authorship, has many Italian affinities. None 
of Shakespeare's comedies breathes a more placid temper 
or catches more faithfully the spirit of the pastoral 
type of drama which Tasso in 'Aminta,' and Guarini 
in 'Pastor Fido,' had lately created not for Italy alone 
but for France and England as well. The dramatist 
follows without serious modification the novelist's guid- 
ance in his treatment of the story. But he significantly 
rejects Lodge's amorphous name of Rosader for his hero 
and substitutes that of Orlando after the hero of Ariosto's 



326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Italian epic.^ While the main conventions of Lodge's 
pastoral setting are loyally accepted, the action is 
touched by Shakespeare with a fresh and graphic vitaHty. 
Lodge's forest of Ardennes, which is the chief scene of his 
story, belonged to Flanders, but Shakespeare added to 
Lodge's Flemish background some features suggestive 
of the Warwickshire woodland of Arden which lay near 
Stratford-on-Avon. Another source than Lodge's pas- 
toral tale, too, gave Shakespeare lively hints for the 
scene of Orlando's fight with Charles the Wrestler, and 
for Touchstone's fantastic description of the diverse 
shapes of a He which prompted duelhng. Both these 
passages were largely inspired by a book called ' Saviolo's 
Practise,' a manual of the art of self-defence, which ap- 
peared in 1595 from the pen of Vincentio Saviolo, an 
Italian fencing-master in the service of the Earl of Essex. 
In more effective fashion Shakespeare strengthened the 
human fibre of Lodge's narrative by original additions 
to the dramatis personcB. Very significant is his intro- 
duction of three new characters, two of whom, Jaques 
^jjg and Touchstone, are incisive critics of life, 

original each from his own point of view, while the 
characters, ^^nx^^ Audrey, suppKes broadly comic rehef 
to the play's comprehensive study of the feminine tem- 
perament. Jaques is a finished study of the meditative 
cynic who has enjoyed much worldly experience and 
dissipation. Touchstone is the most carefully elaborated 
of all Shakespeare's professional wits. The hoyden 
Audrey adds zest to the brilHant and humorous portrayal 

^ Shakespeare directly borrowed his hero's name from The Historie 
of Orlando Furioso (written about 1591 and published in 1594), a crude 
dramatic version of Ariosto's epic by Robert Greene, Shakespeare's 
early foe. In Greene's play, as in Ariosto's poem (canto xxiii.) rnuch 
space is devoted to the love poetry inscribed on 'the barks of divers 
trees' by the hero's rival in the affections of Angelica, or by the lady 
herself. It is the sight of these amorous inscriptions, which in both 
Greene's play and the Italian poem unseats Orlando's reason, and thus 
introduces the main motive. Lodge makes much in his novel of Rosa- 
lynde of his lover Rosader's 'writing on trees.' The change of name 
to Orlando in .45 You Like It is thus easily accounted for. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 327 

of Rosalind, Celia, and Phoebe, varied types of youthful 
womanhood which Shakespeare perfected from Lodge's 
sketches. 

A new play was commonly produced at Queen Eliza- 
beth's Court each Twelfth Night. On the title-pages 
of the first editions of two of Lyly's comedies, 'Twelfth 
'Campaspe' (1584) and 'Midas' (i 591), promi- Night.' 
nence was given to the fact that each was performed 
before Queen Elizabeth on 'twelfe day at night.' The 
main title of Shakespeare's piece has no reference to the 
plot, and doubtless commemorates the fact that it was 
designed for the Twelfth Night of 1559-1600, when 
Shakespeare's company is known to have entertained the 
Sovereign with a play.^ The alternative title of 'What 
You Will' repeats the easy levity of 'As You Like It.' ^ 
Several passages in the text support the conjecture that 
the play was ready for production at the turn of the 
year 1 599-1 600. 'The new map with the augmentation 
of the Indies,' spoken of by Maria (iii. ii. 86), was a 
respectful reference to the great map of the world or 
' hydrographical description' which seems to have been 
engraved in 1599, and first disclosed the full extent of 
recent explorations of the East and West Indies — in 
the New World and the Old.^ The tune of the beautiful 
lyric 'O mistress mine, where are you roaming' was pub- 
fished also in 1599 in a popular music book — Thomas 

^ Shakespeare's company also performed at Court on Twelfth Night, 
i59S~6,. 1596-7, 1597-8, and 1600-1, but the collateral evidence points 
to Twelfth Night of the year 1599- 1600 as the date of the production 
of Shakespeare's piece (Cunningham's Revels, xxxii-iii; Mod. Lang. Rev. 
ii. 9 seq.). 

^ The dramatist Marston paid Shakespeare the flattery of imitation 
by also naming a comedy 'What You Will' which was acted in 1601, 
although it was first published in 1607. 

' The map is very occasionally found in copies of the second edition 
of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, 1 598-1600. It has been repro- 
duced in The Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator, ed. Cap- 
tain A. H. Markham, Hakluyt Soc. 1880. (See Mr. Coote's note on 
the New Map, Ixxxv.-xcv.), and again in Hakluyt's Principal Navi- 
gations (Glasgow, 1903, vol. i. ad fin^. A paper on Shakespeare's men- 
tion of the map, by Mr. Coote, appears in New Shakspere Society's 
Transactions, 1877-9, Pt- i- PP- 88-100, 



328 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Morley's 'First Booke of Consort Lessons, made by 
divers exquisite authors.' There is no reason to deprive 
Shakespeare of the authorship of the words ; but it is 
plain that they were accessible to the musical composer 
before the year 1599 closed.^ Like the 'Comedy of 
Errors,' 'Twelfth Night' enjoyed early in its career the 
experience of production at an Inn of Court. On 
February 2, 1601-2, it was acted by Shake- 
formance spcare's Company at Middle Temple Hall, and 
TempJe"^^^ Johu Manniugham, a student of the Middle 
Hall, Feb. Temple, who was present, described the per- 
2, 1602. formance in his diary which forms an enter- 
taining medley of current experiences.^ Manningham 
wrote that the piece 'called Twelfe Night or what you 
will' which he witnessed in the Hall of his Inn was 'much 
like the " Comedy of Errors" or "Menechmi" in Plautus, 
but most Hke and neere to that in ItaKan called "In- 
ganni."' The diarist especially commends the tricks 
played on MalvoHo and was much diverted by the 
steward's 'gesture in smiling.' 

The Middle Temple diarist was justified in crediting 
the main plot of 'Twelfth Night' with Italian affinities. 
Yj^g Mistakes due to the strong resemblance between 

Italian a young man and his sister, whom circum- 
^^°^' stance has led to assume the disguise of a boy, 

was a common theme of Italian drama and romance, 
and several Italian authors had made the disguised girl 
the embarrassed centre of complex love-adventures. 
But the Middle Temple student does inadequate jiistice 
to the pre-Shakespearean treatment of Viola's fortunes 
either in Italian Kterature or on the Italian stage. No 

^ Robert Jones included in The first booke of Songes and Ayres (1600) 
the words and music of a feeble song 'Farewell, dear love, since I must 
needs be gone,' of which Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (11. iii.) sings 
snatches of the first stanza. Robert Jones was collecting popular 
'ditties' 'by divers gentlemen.' Sir Toby Belch borrows in the play 
several specimens of the same kind, which were already of old standing. 

2 Diary (Camden Soc. p. 18) ed. by John Bruce from Brit. Mus. Harl. 
MS. 5353. The Elizabethan Stage Society repeated the play of Twelfth 
Night in Middle Temple Hall on February 10, 11, and 12, 1897. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 329 

less than three ItaHan comedies of the sixteenth century 
adumbrate the experience of Shakespeare's heroine. 
Two of these Itahan plays are called ' Gh Inganni ' (The 
Deceits), a title which Manningham cites ; but both these 
pieces owe much to an earlier and rnore famous Italian 
play entitled 'GH Ingannati' (The Deceived),^ which 
anticipates Shakespeare's serious plot in 'Twelfth Night' 
more closely than any successor. 'Gli Ingannati' was 
both acted and published at Siena as early as < qjj jjj_ 
1 53 1 and it subsequently enjoyed a world-wide gannati' 
vogue, which neither of the two 'Gli Inganni' 
shared.^ ' Gli Ingannati ' alone was repeatedly reprinted, 
adapted, or translated, not merely in Italy, but in France, 
Spain, and England, long before Shakespeare set to work 
on 'Twelfth Night.' 3 

There is no room for doubt that, whatever the points of 
similarity with either of the two ' Gli Inganni,' the Italian 
comedy of 'Gli Ingannati' is the ultimate Bandeiio's 
source of the leading theme of Shakespeare's 'Nicuoia.' 
'Twelfth Night.' But it is improbable that the poet 

^ Of the two pieces which are christened Gli Inganni, the earlier, 
by Nicolo Secchi, was 'recitata in Milano I'anno 1547' and seems to 
have been first printed in Florence in 1562. There a girl Genevra in 
the disguise of a boy Ruberto provokes the love of a lady called Portia, 
and herself falls in love with her master Gostanzo ; Portia in the end 
voluntarily transfers her affections to Genevra's twin brother Fortunato, 
who is indistinguishable from his sister in appearance. The second Gli 
Inganni is by one Curzio Gonzaga and was printed at Venice in 1592. 
This piece closely follows the lines of its predecessor ; but the disguised 
heroine assumes the masculine name of Cesare, which is significantly 
like that of Cesario, Viola's adopted name in Twelfth Night. 

2 Secchi's Gli Ingatmi was known in France where Pierre de Larivey, 
the well-known writer of comedies, converted it into Les Tromperies, but 
Gli Ingannati alone had an European repute. 

3 A French version of Gli Ingannati by Charles Etienne called at first 
Le Sacrifice and afterwards Les Abiisez went through more than one 
edition (1543, 1549, 1556). A Spanish version — Comedia de los Engana- 
dos — by Lope de Rueda appeared at Valencia in 1567. On Etienne's 
French version of the piece an English scholar at the end of the sixteenth 
century based a Latin play entitled Laelia (after the character adumbrat- 
ing Shakespeare's Viola). This piece was performed at Queens' College, 
Cambridge, before the Earl of Essex and other distinguished visitors, on 
March i, 1595. The MS. of Lcelia is at Lambeth, and was first edited 
by Prof. G. C. Moore Smith in 1910. 



330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

depended on the original text of the drama. He may 
have gathered an occasional hint from subsequent dra- 
matic adaptations in Italian, French, or Latin. Yet 
it is dififi-cult to question that he mainly relied for the 
plot of 'Twelfth Night' on one of the prose tales which 
were directly based upon the primal Italian play. Ban- 
dello's Italian romance of 'Nicuola,' which first appeared 
in his 'Novelle' (ii. 36) in 1554, is a very Hteral rendering 
of the fable of ' Gli Ingannati,' and this novel was acces- 
sible to the Elizabethans not only in the original Italian, 
but in the popular French translation of Bandello's 
work, 'Les Histoires Tragiques/ by Francois de Belle- 
forest (Paris, 1580, No. 63). Cinthio, another Italian 
novelist of the sixteenth century, also narrated the 
dramatic fable in his collection of stories called 'Heca- 
tommithi' (v. 8) which appeared in 1565. It was from 
Cinthio, with some help from Bandello, that Barnabe 
Riche the Elizabethan author drew his English , tale of 
'Apolonius and Silla' (1581).^ Either the Frenchman 
Belief orest or the Englishman Riche furnished Shake- 
speare with his first knowledge of the history of Orsino, 
Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, although the dramatist gave 
these characters names which they had not borne before. 
In any case the English playwright was handling one of 
the most familiar tales in the range of sixteenth-century 
fiction, and was thereby identifying himself beyond risk 
of misconception with the European spirit of contem- 
porary romance. 

Shakespeare invests the romantic pathos of Viola's and 
The new ^^^ Companions' amorous experiences, which 
dramatis the gcnius of Italy created, with his own poetic 
person<e.. gi^j^our, and as in 'Much Ado' and 'As You 
Like It,' he quahfies the languorous tones of the well- 

^ In Riche's tale the adventures of Apolonius, Silla, Julina, and 
Silvio anticipate respectively those of Shakespeare's Orsino, Viola, 
Olivia and Sebastian. Riche makes Julina (Olivia) a rich widow, and 
Manningham speaks of Olivia as a widow, a possible indication that 
Shakespeare, who presents her as a spinster in the extant comedy, gave 
her in a first draft the status with which Riche credited her. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 33 1 

worn tale by grafting on his scene an entirely new group 
of characters whose idiosyncrasies give his brisk humor- 
ous faculty varied play. The steward Malvolio, whose 
ludicrous gravity and vanity take almost a tragic hue as 
the comedy advances, owes nothing to outside suggestion, 
while the mirthful portrayals of Sir Toby Belch, Sir 
Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, the clown Feste, and Maria 
the witty serving-maid, all bear signal witness to the 
originaHty and fertility of Shakespeare's comic powers 
in the energetic era of his maturity. 

No attempt was made at the time of composition to 
print 'Twelfth Night,' which may justly be reckoned the 
flower of Shakespeare's efforts in romantic 
comedy. The play was first pubhshed in the licaUon 
First Folio of 162^. But publishers made an °{^^^ 

• . • trilogy. 

endeavour to issue its two associates 'Much 

Ado' and 'As You Like It,' while the pieces were winning 

their first commendations on the stage. The acting 

company who owned the plays would seem to have 

placed obstacles in the way of both publications and in 

the case of 'As You Like It' the protest took practical 

effect. 

In the early autumn of 1600 application was made to 
the Stationers' Company to license both 'Much Ado' and 
' As You Like It ' with two other plays which Shakespeare's 
company had lately produced, his own 'Henry V' and 
Ben Jonson's 'Every Man in his Humour.' But on 
August 4 the Stationers' Company ordered the issue of 
the four plays ' to be staled.' ^ Twenty days passed and 
on August 24 'Much Ado' was again entered in the 
Stationers' Register by the publishers Andrew Wise and 
WilHam Aspley, together with another Shakespearean 
piece, 'The Second Part of Henry IV.' ^ The comedy 
was then duly printed and published. There are clear 
indications that the first printers of 'Much Ado' had 
access through the good offices of an indulgent actor to 
an authentic playhouse copy. The original quarto was 

^ Stationers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 37. 2 /j^j.^ j^o. 



332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

reproduced in the First Folio with a few additional cor- 
rections which had been made for stage purposes. Of the 
four plays which were 'staled' on August 4, 1600, only 
'As You Like It' failed to surmount the barriers which 
were then placed in the way of its publication. There 
is no issue of 'As You Like It' earlier than that in the 
First Folio. 

Shakespeare's activity knew no pause and a Httle later 
in the year (1600) which saw the production of 'Twelfth 
'Julius Night' he made an experiment in a path of 
Ctesar,' drama which he had previously neglected, 
^^°°' although it had been already well-trodden by 

others. Shakespeare now drew for the first time the plot 
of a tragedy from Plutarch's 'Lives.' On Plutarch's 
Life of Julius Caesar, supplemented by the memoirs of 
Brutus and of Mark Antony, he based his next dramatic 
venture, his tragedy of 'Julius Caesar.' This was the 
earliest of his Roman plays and it preceded by many 
years his two other Roman tragedies — ' Antony and 
Cleopatra' and 'Coriolanus.' ^ The piece was first 
published in the Folio of 1623. Internal evidence alone 
determines the date of composition. The character- 
isation is signally virile; the metrical features hover 
between early regularity and late irregularity, and the 
dehberate employment of prose, notably in the studied 
oratory of Brutus in the great scene of the Forum, would 
seem to anticipate at no long interval the like artistic 
usage of 'Hamlet.' All these traits suggest a date of 
composition at the midmost point of the dramatist's 
career, and the autumn of 1600 satisfactorily answers 
the conditions of the problem.^ 

1 Although Titus Andronicus professes to present incident of late 
Roman history, the plot lacks all historical foundation. In any case 
Shakespeare had small responsibility for that piece. His second narra- 
tive poem, Lucrece, is securely based, however, on a legend of early 
Roman history and attests Shakespeare's youthful interest in the subject. 

^ John Weever's mention in his Mirror of Martyrs (1601) of the 
speeches of Brutus and Csesar in the Forum and of their effects on ' the 
many-headed multitude' is commonly held to echo Shakespeare's plaj'. 
But Weever's slender reference to the topic may as well have been 



/ 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 333 

In his choice ahke of theme and of authority Shake- 
speare adds in ' Juhus Caesar ' one more striking proof of 
his eager readiness to follow in the wake of popuiaj.ity 
workers in drama abroad as well as at home, of the 
Plutarch's biographies furnished the dramatists *'^^"^^- 
of Italy, France, and England with much tragic material 
from the middle years of the sixteenth century, and the 
fortunes of Julius Cassar in the Greek biographer's 
pages had chiefly attracted their energy.^ 

At times Shakespeare's predecessors sought additional 
information about the Dictator in the ' Roman histories ' 
of the Alexandrine Greek Appian, and there are ^^^^ ^^^^ 
signs that Shakespeare, too, may have had occa- to 
sional recourse to that work, which was readily ^^^'^'^'^^■ 
accessible in an English version published as early as 
1578. But Plutarch, whose 'Lives ' first raised biography 
to the level of a literary art, was Shakespeare's main 

drawn from Plutarch or Appian, and may have been framed without 
knowledge of Shakespeare's spirited eloquence. Nothing more definite 
can be deduced from Drayton's introduction into his Barons' Wars 
(1603) of lines depicting the character of his hero Mortimer, which are 
held to reflect Antony's elegy on Brutus {Jul. Cces. v. v. 73-6). Both 
passages attribute perfection in man to a mixture of the elements in due 
proportion — a reflection which was a commonplace of contemporary 
literature. 

^ Marc-Antoine Muret, professor of the college of Guienne at Bor- 
deaux, based on Plutarch's life of Cassar a Latin tragedy, which was 
acted by his students (the essayist Montaigne among them) in 1544. 
Sixteen years later Jacques Grevin, then a pupil at the College of Beau- 
vais, wrote for presentation by his fellow-collegians a tragedy on the 
same topic cast in Senecan mould in rhyming French verse. Grevin's 
tragedy acquired a wide reputation and inaugurated some traditions in 
the dramatic treatment of Csesar's death, which Shakespeare consciously 
or unconsciously developed. Grevin sought his material in Appian's 
Romance Historice as well as in Plutarch. Robert Gamier, the chief 
French writer of tragedy at the end of the sixteenth century, introduced 
Cassar, Mark Antony, Cassius, and other of Shakespeare's characters, 
into his tragedy of Cornelie (Pompey's widow). Mark Antony is also 
the leading personage in Garnier's two other Roman tragedies, Porcie 
(Portia, Brutus's widow) and Marc Antoine. In 1594 an Italian drama- 
tist, Orlando Pescetti, published at Verona // Cesare Tragoedia (2nd 
ed. 1604) which like Grevin's work is based on both Plutarch and Appian 
and anticipates at many points, probably by accident, Shakespeare's 
treatment. See Dr. Alexander Boecker's A Probable Italian Source of 
Shakespeare's Julius Casar (New York, 1913). 



334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

guide. The Greek biographies were at his hand in an 
English garb, which was worthy of the original language. 
Sir Thomas North's noble translation was first printed in 
London by the Huguenot stationer, Vautrolher, in 1579, 
and was reissued by Shakespeare's fellow- townsman and 
Vautrollier's successor Richard Field in 1595.^ Shake- 
speare's character of Theseus in 'Midsummer Night's 
Dream' may owe something to Plutarch's account of 
that hero. But there is no proof of any thorough study 
of Plutarch on Shakespeare's part before he planned 
his drama of 'JuHus Caesar.' There he followed the 
details of Plutarch's story in North's rendering with an 
' even closer fidelity than when Holinshed's Chronicle 
guided him in his Enghsh history plays. But Shake- 
speare is never a slavish disciple. With characteristic 
originahty he interweaves Plutarch's biographies of 
Brutus and Antony with his life of Caesar. Brutus's fate 
rather than Caesar's is his leading concern. Under the 
vivifying force of Shakespeare's genius Plutarch's person- 
ages and facts finally acquire a glow of dramatic fire 
which is all the dramatist's own gift. 

Shakespeare plainly hints at the wide dissemination 
of Caesar's tragic story through dramatic literature when 
Shake- he makcs Cassius prophesy, in presence of 
anTother ^^^ dictator's bleeding corpse (iii. 111-114), 

plays about 

Caesar. How many ages hence 

Shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er 

In states unborn and accents yet unknown ! 

— a speech to which Brutus adds the comment 

' How many times shall Csesar bleed in sport ! ' 

In 'Hamlet' (iii. ii. 108 seq.) Shakespeare makes Polonius 
recall how he played the part of Julius Caesar 'at the 

^ North followed the French version of Jacques Amyot (Paris, 1559), 
which made Plutarch's Lives a standard French work. Montaigne, 
who was an enthusiastic admirer of Plutarch, called Amyot's rendering 
'our breviary.' 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 335 

University' and how he was killed by Brutus in the 
Capitol. Yet, in spite of his recognition of pre-existing 
dramatic literature on the subject, no clear trace is found 
in Shakespeare's tragedy of indebtedness to any of his 
dramatic forerunners. In England Cassar's struggle 
with Pompey had been pressed into the earlier service of 
drama quite as frequently as his overthrow, and that 
episode in Caesar's life Shakespeare well-nigh ignored.^ 

Shakespeare's piece is a penetrating study of political 
life. Brutus, whose family traditions compel in him de- 
votion to the cause of political liberty, allows 
himself to be persuaded to head a revolution; speare's 
but his gentle and philosophic temper engenders jP°'j'^J^'f ^ 
scruples of conscience which spell failure in the 
stormy crisis. In Cassius, the man of action, an honest 
abhorrence of political tyranny is freed from any punctili- 
ous sense of honour. Casca, the third conspirator, is an 
aristocratic Hberal politician with a breezy contempt for 
the mob. Mark Antony, the pleasure-seeker, is meta- 
morphosed into a statesman — ■ decisive and eloquent — 
by the shock of the murder of Caesar, his uncle and 
benefactor. The death and funeral of Caesar form the 
central episode of the tragedy, and no previous dramatist 
pursued the story beyond the outcry of the Roman popu- 
lace against Cesar's assassins. Shakespeare alone among 
pla3rwrights carries on the historic episode to the defeat 
and suicide of the leading conspirators at the battle of 
Philippi. 

1 Most of the early English plays on Caesar's history are lost. Such 
was the fate of a play called Julius Ccesar acted before Queen Elizabeth 
in February 1562 (Machyn's Diary) ; of The History of Casar and Pom- 
pey which was popular in London about 1580 (Gosson's Plays Confuted, 
1581) ; of a Latin drama called Casar Interfectus by Richard Fades, 
which was acted at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1582, and may be the 
university piece cited by Polonius; of Ccesar and Pompey ('Seser and 
Pompie') which was produced by Henslowe and the Admiral's com- 
pany on November 8, 1594, and of the second part of Ccesar {the 2 pte 
of Sesore) which was similarly produced on June 18, 1595. Surviving 
plays of the epoch in which Cffisar figures were produced after Shake- 
speare's tragedy, e.g. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling's Julius Ccesar 
(1604) and George Chapman's Ccesar and Pompey (1614?). 



336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The peril of dramatic anticlimax in relegating Caesar's 
assassination to the middle distance is subtly averted in 
His con- Shakespeare's play by the double and some- 
ceptionof what ironical process of belittling, on the one 
^^^^' hand, Caesar's stature in his last days of life, 
and of magnifying, on the other hand, the spiritual in- 
fluence of his name after death. The dramatist divests 
Caesar of most of his heroic attributes; his dominant 
personality is seen to be sinking from the outset under 
the burden of physical and moral weakness. Yet his 
exalted posthumous fame supplies an efficient motive for 
the scenes which succeed his death. 'Thou art mighty 
yet, thy spirit walks abroad,' the words which spring to 
the lips of the dying Brutus, supply the key to the 
dramatic equipoise, which Shakespeare maintains to the 
end. The fifth act, which presents the battle of Philippi 
in progress, proves ineffective on the stage, but the 
reader never relaxes his interest in the fortunes of the 
vanquished Brutus, whose death is the catastrophe. 

The pronounced success of ' Julius Caesar ' in the theatre 
is strongly corroborated by an attempt on the part of a 
A rival rival manager to supplant it in public favour 
piece. \yy another piece on the same popular theme. 

In 1602 Henslowe brought together a band of distin- 
guished authors, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, 
John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and others, and com- 
missioned them to produce 'a book called "Caesar's 
Fall."' The manager advanced to the syndicate the 
sum of 5Z. on May 22, 1602. Nothing else is known of 
the design. 

The theatrical world was meantime gravely disturbed 
by critical incidents which only remotely involved literary 
issues. While 'Julius Caesar' was winning its 
Mayor"^ fifst laurcls ou the stage, the fortunes of the 
and the London theatres were menaced by two mani- 
festations of unreasoning prejudice on the part 
of the public. The earHer manifestation, although 
speciously serious, was in effect innocuous. The Puri- 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 337 

tans of the City had long agitated for the suppression 
of all theatrical performances, whether in London 
or its environs. But the Privy Council stood by the 
players and declined to sanction the restrictive by- 
laws for which the Corporation from time to time 
pressed. The flames of the municipal agitation had 
burnt briskly, if without genuine effect, on the eve of 
Shakespeare's arrival in London. The outcry gradu- 
ally subsided, although the puritan suspicions were not 
dead. After some years of comparative inaction the 
civic authorities inaugurated at the end of 1596 a fresh 
and embittered campaign against the players. The 
puritanic Lord Cobham then entered on his short tenure 
of ofhce as Lord Chamberlain. His predecessor Lord 
Hunsdon was a warm friend of the actors, and until 
his death the staunch patron of Shakespeare's company. 
In the autumn of 1596 Thomas Nashe, the dramatist 
and satirist, sadly wrote to a friend : ' The players are 
piteously persecuted by the lord mayor and aldermen, 
and however in their old Lord's [the late Lord Huns- 
don's] time they thought their state settled, 'tis now so 
uncertain they cannot build upon it.' The melancholy 
prophecy soon seemed on perilous point of fulfilment. 
On July 28, 1597, the Privy Council, contrary to its 
wonted poHcy, ordered, at the Lord Mayor's invitation, 
all playhouses within a radius of three miles to be pulled 
down. Happily the Council was in no earnest mood. 
It suffered its drastic order to remain a dead letter, and 
soon bestowed on the profession fresh marks of favour. 
Next year (February 19, 1597-8) the Council specifically 
acknowledged the rights and privileges of the Lord Ad- 
miral's and the Lord Chamberlain's companies,'^ and when 
on July 19, 1598, the vestry of St. Saviour's parish, 
Southwark, repeated the City Corporation's protest 

^ Acts of the Privy Council, 1597-8, p. 327. The two companies were 
described as alone entitled to perform at Court, and 'a third company' 
(which was not more distinctly named) was warned against encroaching 
on their rights. 



338 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and urged the Council to suppress the playhouses on the 
Bankside, a deaf ear was turned ofi&cially to the appeal. 
The Master of the Revels merely joined with two prom- 
inent members of the Council, the Archbishop of Can- 
terbury and the Bishop of London, in an endeavour to 
soften the vestry's heart, not by attacking the offending 
theatres, but by arranging with the Southwark players 
to contribute to the support of the poor of the parish. 
The Council appeared to be deliberately treading paths 
of conciliation or mediation in the best interest of the 
players. None the less the renewed agitation of the 
Lord Mayor and his colleagues failed to abate, and in 
the summer of 1600 the Privy Council seemed to threaten 
under pressure a reversal of its complacent policy. On 
June 22, 1600, the Council issued to the officers of the 
Corporation of London and to the justices of the peace 
The Privy ^i Middlesex and Surrey an order restraining 
Council 'the immoderate use and company of play- 
june 22, houses and players.' Two acting companies 
1600. — the Lord Admiral's and the Lord Chamber- 

lain's — were alone to be suffered to perform in London, 
and only two playhouses were to be allowed to continue 
work — one in Middlesex (the ' Fortune ' in Cripplegate, 
AUeyn's new playhouse then in course of building), and 
the other in Surrey (the 'Globe' on the Bankside). 
The 'Curtain' was to be pulled down. All stage plays 
were to be forbidden 'in any common inn for public 
assembly in or near about the city' and the prohibition 
was interpreted to extend to the 'private' playhouses 
of the Blackfriars and St. Paul's, which were occupied 
by boy actors. The two privileged companies were, 
moreover, only to perform twice a week, and their 
theatres were to be closed on the Sabbath day, during 
Lent, and in times of 'extraordinary sickness' in or 
about the City.^ The contemplated restrictions were 
likely, if carried out, to deprive a large number of actors 
of employment, to drive others into the provinces where 

^ Acts of the Privy Council, 1599-1600, pp. 395-8. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 339 

their livelihood was always precarious, and seriously to 
fetter the activities of the few actors who were specially 
excepted from the bulk of the new regulations. The 
decree promised Shakespeare's company a certain relief 
from competition, but the price was high. Not only 
was their regular employment to be arbitrarily dimin- 
ished, but they were to make a humiliating submission to 
the vexatious prejudices of a narrow clique. 

Genuine alarm was created in the profession by the 
Privy Council's action ; but fortunately the sound and 
fury came to little. What was the intention of the 
Council must remain matter for conjecture. It is cer- 
tain that neither the municipal authorities nor the 
magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex, to all of whom the 
Privy Council addressed itself, made any attempt to 
put the stringent decree into operation, and the Privy 
Council was quite ready to let it sleep. All the London 
theatres that were already in existence went on their way 
unchecked. The innyards continued to be applied to 
theatrical uses. The London companies saw no decrease 
in their numbers, and performances followed one another 
day after day without interruption. But so solemn a 
threat of legal interference bred for a time anxiety in 
the profession, and the year 1601 was a period of sus- 
pense among men of Shakespeare's calling.^ 

More calamitous was a temporary reverse of fortune 
which Shakespeare's company, in common with some 
other companies of adult actors, suffered, as the new 

1 On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to the 
Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex 
expressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the 
number of playhouses in accordance with 'our order set down and 
prescribed about a year and a half since.' But nothing followed during 
Shakespeare's lifetime, and no more was heard officially of the Council's 
order until 1619, when the Corporation of London called attention to 
its practical abrogation at the same time as they directed the suppres- 
sion (which was not carried out) of the Blackfriars theatre. All the 
documents on this subject are printed from the Privy Council Register 
by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 307-9. They are well digested in Dr. V. C. 
GUdersleeve's Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New 
York, 1908, pp. 178 seq.). 



340 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

century dawned, at the hands, not of fanatical enemies 
of the drama, but of play-goers who were 

The strife ., i ^ 'tpt, c u 

between its avowcd supporters. Ihe company of boy 
adult and actors, rccruited from the choristers of the 
Chapel Royal, and known as ' the Children of 
the Chapel,' was in the autumn of 1600 firmly installed at 
the new theatre in Blackfriars, and near the same date a 
second company of boy actors, which was formed of the 
choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral, re-opened, after a 
five years' interval, its private playhouse within the 
cathedral precincts. Through the winter season of 
1 600- 1 the fortunes of the veterans, who occupied the 
public or 'common' stages of London, were put in 
jeopardy by the extravagant outburst of public favour 
evoked by the performances of the two companies of 
boys. Dramatists of the first rank placed their services 
at the boys' disposal. Ben Jonson and George Chap- 
man, whose dramatic work was rich in comic strength, 
were active in the service of the Children of the 
Chapel at the Blackfriars theatre, while John Marston, 
a playwright who promised to excel in romantic tragedy, 
allowed his earliest and best plays to be interpreted for 
the first time by the 'Children of Paules.' The boy 
actors included in their ranks at the time performers of 
exceptional promise. Three of the Chapel Children, 
Nathaniel Field, William Ostler, and John Underwood, 
who won their first laurels during the memorable season 
of 1 600-1, joined in manhood Shakespeare's company, 
while a fourth child actor of the period, Salathiel Pavy, . 
who died prematurely, still lives in Ben Jonson's pathetic 
elegy, where the poet plays with the fancy that the boy 
rendered old men's parts so perfectly as to give Death a 
wrong impression of his true age. 

Many references in plays of the period bear witness 
to the loss of popular favour and of pecuniary profit 
which the boys' triumphs cost their professional seniors. 
Ben Jonson, in his 'Poetaster,' puts in the mouth of one 
of his characters 'Histrio, the actor,' the statement that 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 341 

the winter of 1 600-1 'hath made us all poorer than so 
many starved snakes.' 'Nobody,' the discon- shake- 
solate player adds, ' comes at us, not a gentle- speare on 

man nor a .' ^ The most graphic account of season 

the actors' misfortunes figures in Shakespeare's i^oo-i. 
tragedy of 'Hamlet,' which was first sent to press in an 
imperfect draft in the year 1602.^ 'The tragedians of 
the city,' in whom Hamlet was 'wont to take such 
dehght,' are represented as visiting Elsinore on a pro- 
vincial tour. Hamlet expresses surprise that they 
should travel,' seeing that the town brought actors 
greater 'reputation and profit' than the country. But 
the explanation is offered : 

Y' faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away, 

For the principal publike audience that 

Came to them [i.e. the old actors] are turned to private playes 

And to the humours of children.^ 

The public no longer (Hamlet learns) held the actors in 
'the same estimation' as in former years. There was 
no falling off in their efficiency, but they were out- 
matched by ' an aery [i.e. nest] of children, little eyases 
[i.e. young hawks],' who dominated the theatrical world, 
and monopolised public applause. ' These are now the 

^ Poetaster, ed. Mallory, iv. iii. 345-7. 

2 Only the First Folio Version of 1623 supplies Shakespeare's full 
comment on the subject : see act 11. sc. ii. 348-394. Both the First and 
the Second Quarto notice the misfortunes of the 'tragedians of the 
city' very briefly. To the ten lines which the quartos furnish the First 
Folio adds twenty. 

^ These lines are peculiar to the First Quarto. In the Second Quarto 
and in the First Folio they are replaced by the sentence ' I think their 
[i.e. the old actors'] inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.' 
Many comrrientators follow Steevens in interpreting the 'late innova- 
tion' of the later Hamlet texts as the order of the Privy Council of June 
1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two and other- 
wise prejudicing the actors' freedom ; but that order was never put in 
force, and in no way affected the actors' fortunes. The First Quarto 
text makes it clear that ' the late innovation ' to which the players' mis- 
fortunes were assigned in the later texts was the 'noveltie' of the boys' 
performances. ' Private plays ' were plays at private theatres — the 
class of playhouse to which both the Blackfriars and Paul's theatres 
belonged (see p. 67). 



342 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

fashion/ the dramatist lamented, and he made the com- 
mon players' forfeiture of popularity the text of a re- 
flection on the fickleness of public taste : 

Hamlet. Do the boys carry it away? 

RosENCRANTZ. Ay, that they do, my lord, Hercules and his load too. 

Hamlet. It is not very strange; for my uncle is King of Denmark, 
and those that would make mows at him whUe my father lived, give 
twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little. ^ 

The difficulties of the actors in the public theatres 
were greatly accentuated by a heated controversy which 
burnt very briskly in 1601 among the drama- 
^are^in°'^^ tists, and iuvolvcd Shakespeare's company 
jonson's and to some extent Shakespeare himself. The 
contro- boys' notoriety and success were signally 
versies increased by personal dissensions among the 

1598-1601. , ^lA 1 riTT-nx 

playwrights. As early as 1598 John Marston 
made a sharp attack on Ben Jonson's literary style, 
opening the campaign in his satire entitled ' The Scourge 
of Villanie,' and quickly developing it in his play of 
'Histriomastix.' Jonson soon retahated by lampoon- 
ing Marston and his friends on the stage. Each pro- 
tagonist was at the time a newcomer in the literary field, 
and the charges which they brought against each other 
were no more heinous than that of penning 'fustian' 
or of inventing awkward neologisms. Yet they quickly 
managed to divide the playwrights of the day into two hos- 
tile camps, and public interest fastened on their recrimina- 
tions. Ben Jonson's range of attack came to cover 
dramatists, actors, courtiers, or citizens who either failed 
to declare themselves on his side or professed indifference 
to the quarrel. This war of personalities raged confusedly 
for three years, reaching its climax in 1601. Shake- 
speare's company and both the companies of the boys 
were pressed by one or the other party into the strife, 
and the intervention of the Children of the Chapel gave 
them an immense advantage over the occupants of 
rival stages. 

^ Hamlet, 11. ii. 349-64. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 343 

In the initial phases of the campaign Shakespeare's 
company lent Jonson its countenance. The assault on 
Jonson which Marston inaugurated in his book <Histrio- 
of satires, he continued with the aid of friends mastix,' 
in the play involving varied personal issues ^^^ ' 
called ' Histriomastix or the Player Whipt.' ^ The St. 
Paul's boys, who were producing Marston's serious 
dramatic work at the time, were apparently responsible 
for the early performances of this lumbering piece of 
irony. Jonson weightily retorted in 1599 in his com- 
prehensive social satire of 'Every Man out of 'Every 
his Humour,' and Shakespeare's company so Man out 
far identified themselves with the sensitive Humour,' 
dramatist's cause as to stage that comedy at the ^S99- 
Globe theatre. 'Every Man out of his Humour ' proved 
the first of four 'pieces of artillery which Jonson brought 
into the field. But Shakespeare's company was re- 
luctant to be dragged further at Jonson's heel, and it 
was the boys at Blackfriars who interpreted the rest 
of his controversial dramas to the huge delight of play- 
goers who welcomed the paradox of hearing Ben Jonson's 
acrid humour on childish tongues. In his more or less 
conventional comedy of intrigue called 'The Case is 
Altered,' which the boys brought out in 1599, four 
subsidiary characters, Antonio Balladino ^ the pageant 

^ This rambling review of the vices of contemporary society derided 
not only Ben Jonson's arrogance (in the character of Chrisoganus) but 
also adult actors generally with their patrons and their authors. Some 
of the shafts were calculated to disparage Shakespeare's company, the 
best organised troop on the stage. The earliest extant edition of His- 
triomast'ix is dated 1610. But internal evidence and a reference which 
Jonson made to it in his Every Man out of his Humour, 1599 (Act iii. 
sc. i.), show it to have been written in 1598. It is reprinted in Simpson's 
School of Shakspere, ii. i seq. 

2 Antonio Balladino is a plain caricature of Anthony Munday, the 
industrious playwright, and, although Marston's features are not recog- 
nised with certainty in any of the other ludicrous dramatis personce, The 
Case is Altered was held to score heavily in Jonson's favour in his fight 
with Marston. According to the title-page of the first edition (1609) 
the piece was 'sundry times acted by the Children of the Blackfriers.' 
It seems to have been the earliest piece of the kind which was entrusted 
to the Chapel boys' tender mercies. 



344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

poet, Juniper a cobbler, Peter Onion groom of the hall, 
and Pacue a French page, were justly suspected of trav- 
estying identifiable men of letters. A year later, 
in 1600, Jonson won a more pronounced success when 
'Cynthia's he causcd the Children of the Chapel to pro- 
Revels.' duce at Blackfriars his 'Cynthia's Revels,' 
an encyclopaedic satire on literary fashions and on the 
public taste of the day. There, under the Greek names 
of Amorphus, Asotus, Hedon, and Anaides, various 
literary foes were paraded as laughing-stocks. An 
'Induction' to the play takes the shape of a pretended 
quarrel amongst three of the actor-children as to who 
shall speak the prologue. 'By this light,' the third 
child remarks with mocking self-depreciation, 'I wonder 
that any man is so mad to come and see these rascally 
tits play here ' ^ ; but it is certain that the sting of 
Jonson's taunts lost nothing on the boys' precocious lips. 
There is some ground for assuming that the Children 
'Jack of Paul's replied without delay to 'Cynthia's 

Drum's Revcls' in an anonymous piece called 'Jack 
ment,' " Drum's Entertainment, or the Comedie of 
1601. Pasquil,' where a story of intrigue is interwoven 

with mordant parodies of Jonson's foibles.^ Meanwhile 

^ The author, in the person of Crites, one of the characters, shrewdly 
argues that fantastic vanity and futile self-conceit are the springs of 
all fashionable drama and poetry. Incidental compliments to Queen 
Elizabeth, who was represented as presiding over the literary revels 
in her familiar poetic name of Cynthia, increased the play's vogue. 

2 In 'The Introduction' of Jack Drum's Entertainment, one of the 
children, parodying Jonson's manner, promises the audience not to 

torment i- x - 

your listening eares 

With mouldie fopperies of stale Poetrie, 
Unpossible drie mustie fictions. 

Elsewhere in the piece emphasis is laid on the gentility and refined 
manners of the audience for which the St. Paul's boys catered, as com- 
pared with the roughness and boorishness of the frequenters of the 
adult actors' theatres. The success of the 'children' is assigned to 
that advantage rather than to their histrionic superiority over the men. 
Jack Drum's Entertainment, which was published in 1601, would seem 
to be the work of a critical onlooker of the pending controversy who 
detected faults on both sides, but deemed Jonson the chief offender. 
See reprint in Simpson's School of Shakspere, ii. 199 et passim. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 345 

the rumour spread that Marston and Dekker, who 
deemed themselves specially maligned by 'Cynthia's 
Revels,' were planning a bolder revenge at the Globe 
theatre. Jonson forestalled the blow by completing 
within fifteen weeks a fourth ' comical satire ' which he 
called 'Poetaster, or his arraignment.' This 'Poetas- 
new attack, which the boys delivered at Black- ^^^'' ^^°^- 
friars early in 1601, was framed in a classical mould.-*^ 
The main theme ^ caustically presents the poet Horace 
as pestered by the importunities of the poetaster Cris- 
pinus and his friend Demetrius. Horace finally ar- 
raigned his two tormentors before Caesar on a charge of 
defamation, in that they had 'taxed' him falsely of 'self- 
love, arrogancy, impudence, railing, and filching by 
translation.' Virgil was summoned by Caesar to sit 
with other Latin poets in judgment on these accusations. 
A triumphant acquittal of Horace follows, and the 
respondents are convicted of malicious libel. Demetrius 
admits the offence, while Crispinus, who is sentenced 
to drink a dose of hellebore, von;iits with Rabelaisian 
realism a multitude of cacophonous words to which he 
has given literary currency. Although the identifica- 
tion of many of the personages of the 'Poetaster' is open 
to question, Jonson himself, Marston, and Dekker stand 
confessed beneath the names respectively of Horace, 
Crispinus, and Demetrius. In subsidiary scenes Histrio, 
an adult actor, was held up to scornful ridicule and else- 
where lawyers were roughly handled. Ben Jonson put 
little restraint on his temper, and the boys once again 
proved equal to their interpretative functions. 

^ In the words of the prologue, Jonson 

chose Augustus Caesar's times 
When wit and arts were at their height in Rome ; 
To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest 
Of those great master-spirits did not want 
Detractors then or practisers against them. 

^ A subsidiary thread of interest was innocuously wrought out of 
the familiar tale of the poet Ovid's amours and exile, while brisk sketches 
were furnished of Ovid's literary contemporaries, TibuUus, Propertius, 
and other well-known Roman writers. 



346 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Clumsy yet effective retaliation was provided without 
delay by the players of Shakespeare's company. They 
' answered ' Jonson and his ' company of horrible 
'Satiro-^ blackfryers' 'at their own weapons,' by pro- 
mastix,' ducing after a brief interval a violent piece 
of 'detraction' by Dekker called ' Satiromastix, 
or the Un trussing of the Humourous Poet.' ^ Amid an 
irrelevant story of romantic intrigue all the polemical 
extravagances of the 'Poetaster' were here parodied at 
Jonson's expense with brutal coarseness. Jonson's per- 
sonal appearance and habits were offensively analysed, 
and he was ultimately crowned with a garland of sting- 
ing nettles. ' The Children of Paul's ' — who were the 
persistent rivals of the Chapel Children — eagerly aided 
the men actors in this strenuous endeavour to bring 
Jonson to book. 'Satiromastix' was produced in the 
private playhouse of Paul's soon after it appeared at the 
Globe.^ The issue of this wide publicity was happier 
than might have been expected. The foolish and freak- 
ish controversy received its deathblow. Jonson peace- 
fully accepted a warning from the authorities 
ofthe^ to refrain from further hostihties, and his op- 
dramatists' ponents readily came to terms with him. He 
was soon writing for Shakespeare's company a 
new tragedy, 'Sejanus' (1603), in which Shakespeare 
played a part. Marston, in dignified Latin prose, 
dedicated to him his next play, 'The Malcontent' (1604), 
and the two gladiators thereupon joined forces with 
Chapman in the composition of a third piece, ' Eastward 
Ho' (i6o5).3 

^ This piece was licensed for the press on November ii, 1601, which 
was probably near the date of its iirst performance. The epilogue 
makes a reference to 'this cold weather.' 

^ On the title-page of the first edition (1602) Satiromastix is stated 
to have 'bin presented publikely by the Right Honorable, the Lord 
Chamberlaine his Seruants and priuately by the children of Paules.' 

^ Much ingenuity has been expended on the interpretation of the 
many personal allusions scattered broadcast through the various plays 
in which the dramatic poets fought out their battle. Save in the few 
instances which are cited above, the application of the personal gibes 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 347 

The most material effect of 'that terrible poeto- 
machia ' (to use Dekker's language) was to stimulate the 
vogue of the children. Playgoers took sides in shake- 
the struggle, and their attention was for the speare 
season of 1 600-1 riveted, to the exclusion of 'poeto- 
topics more germane to their province, on the machia.' 
actors' and dramatists' boisterous war of personalities.^ 

It is not easy to trace Shakespeare's personal course 
of action through this ' war of high words ' — which he 
stigmatised in 'Hamlet' as a 'throwing about of brains.' 
It is only on collateral incidents of the petty strife that 

is rarely quite certain. Ben Jonson would seem at times to have inten- 
tionally disguised his aim by crediting one or other subsidiary character 
in his plays with traits belonging to more persons than one. Nor did 
he confine his attack to dramatists. He hit out freely at men who had 
offended him in all ranks and professions. The meaning of the con- 
troversial sallies has been very thoroughly discussed in Mr. Josiah H. 
Penniman's The War of the Theatres (Series in Philology, Literature and 
Archasology, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1897, iv. 3) and in his introduction 
to Ben Jonson's Poetaster and Dekker's Satiromastix in Belles-Lettres 
Series (1912), as well as by H. C. Hart in Notes and Queries, Series IX. 
vols. II and 12 passim, and in Roscoe A. Small's 'The Stage Quarrel 
between Ben Jonson and the so-called Poetasters' in Forschungen zur 
Englischen Sprache und Litteratur, 1899. Useful reprints of the rare 
plays Histriomastix (1598) and Jack Drum's Entertainment (1601) figure 
in Simpson's School of Shaksperc, but the conclusion regarding the poets' 
warfare reached in the prefatory comments there is not very convincing. 
^ Throughout the year 1601 offensive personalities seem to have in- 
fected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council 
called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly 
levelled by the actors of the ' Curtain ' at gentlemen ' of good desert and 
quality, and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they 
were produced' (Privy Council Register). Jonson subsequently issued 
an ' apologetical dialogue' (appended to printed copies of the Poetaster), 
in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players 
of the common stages : 

Now for the players 'tis true I tax'd them 

And yet but some, and those so sparingly 

As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned, 

Had they but had the wit or conscience 

To think well of themselves. But impotent they 

Thought each man's vice belonged to their whole tribe ; 

And much good do it them. What they have done against me 

I am not moved with, if it gave them meat 

Or got them clothes, 'tis well ; that was their end, 

Only amongst them I am sorry for 

Some better natures by the rest so drawn 

To run in that vile line. 



348 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

he has left any clearly expressed view, but he obviously 
Shake- resented the enlistment of the children in the 
speare's campaign of virulence. In his play of ' Ham- 
to thT^^^ let' he protested vigorously against the abu- 
struggie. sive spccch which Jonson and his satellites 
contrived that the children's mouths should level at the 
men actors of 'the common stages,' or public theatres. 
Rosencrantz declared that the children 'so berattle [i.e. 
assail] the common stages — so they call them — that 
many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and 
dare scarce come thither [i.e. to the pubHc theatres].' ^ 
Pursuing the theme, Hamlet pointed out that the writers 
who encouraged the precocious insolence of the 'child 
actors ' did them a poor service, because when the boys 
should reach men's estate they would run the risk, if 
they continued on the stage, of the same insults and 
neglect with which they now threatened their seniors. 

Hamlet. What, are they children? who maintains 'em? how are 
they escoted? [i.e. paid]. Will they pursue the quality [i.e. the actor's 
profession] no longer than they can sing? will they not say afterwards, 
if they should grow themselves to common players — as it is most like, 
if their means are no better — their writers do them wrong, to make 
them exclaim against their own succession? 

Rosencrantz. Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; 
and the nation holds it no sin to tarre [i.e. incite] them to controversy : 
there was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and 
the player went to cuffs in the question. 

Hamlet. Is it possible? 

GuiLDENSTERN. O, there has been much throwing about of brains ! 

Shakespeare was not alone among the dramatists in his 
„, emphatic expression of regret that the boys 

Heywood should havc been pressed into the futile warfare. 
Shaie- Thomas Heywood, the actor-playwright who 
speare's shared Shakespeare's professional sentiments 
protest. ^g ^^Yi as his professional experiences, echoed 
Hamlet's shrewd comments when he wrote : ' The liberty 

^ Jonson in Cynthia's Revels (Induction) applies the term 'comrnon 
stages' to the public theatres. ' Goosequillian ' is the _ epithet applied 
to Posthast, an actor-dramatist who is a character in Histriomastix 
(see p. 343 supra). 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 349 

which some arrogate to themselves, committing their 
bitternesse, and hberall invectives against all estates, 
to the mouthes of children, supposing their juniority to 
be a privilegde for any rayling, be it never so violent, I 
could advise all such to curb and limit this presumed 
liberty within the bands of discretion and government.' ^ 

While Shakespeare thus sided on enlightened grounds 
with the adult actors in their professional competition 
with the boys, he would seem to have watched shake- 
Ben Jonson's personal strife both with fellow speare's 
authors and with actors in the serene spirit of a terSted 
disinterested spectator and to have eschewed attitude, 
any partisan bias. In the prologue to 'Troilus and 
Cressida' which he penned in 1603, he warned his 
hearers, with obvious allusion to Ben Jonson's battles, 
that he hesitated to identify himself with either actor 
or poet. 

Jonson had in his 'Poetaster' put into the mouth of 
his Prologue the lines : 

If any muse why I salute the stage, 

An armed Prologue ; know, 'tis a dangerous age : 

Wherein, who writes, had need present his scenes 

Fortie fold-proofe against the conjuring meanes 

Of base detractors, and illiterate apes, 

That fill up roomes in faire and formall shapes. 

'Gainst these, have we put on this forc't defence. 

In 'Troilus and Cressida' Shakespeare's Prologue 
retorted : 

Hither am I come, 
A prologue arm'd, but not in confidence 
Of author's pen or actor's voice, but suited 
In like conditions as our argument, 

which began 'in the middle' of the Graeco-Trojan 'broils.' 
Passages in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster' suggest, more- 
over, that Shakespeare cultivated so assiduously an 
attitude of neutrahty on the main issues that Jonson 
finally acknowledged him to be qualified for the role of 

^ Heywood, Apology for Actors, 1612 (Sh. Soc), p. 61. 



350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

peacemaker. The gentleness of disposition with which 
Shakespeare was invariably credited by his friends 
would have well fitted him for such an office. Jonson, 
Virgil in ^^° figures in the ' Poetaster ' under the name 
jonson's ^ of Horace, joins his friends, Tibullus and Gallus, 
oetaster. -^ eulogising the work and genius of another 
character, Virgil, and the terms whch are employed so 
closely resemble those which were popularly applied to 
Shakespeare that the praises of Virgil may be regarded 
as intended to apply to the great dramatist (act v. sc. i.). 
Jonson points out that Virgil, by his penetrating intui- 
tion, achieved the great effects which others laboriously 
sought to reach through rules of art. 

His learning labours not the school-like gloss 

That most consists of echoing words and terms ... 

Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance — 

Wrapt in the curious generalties of arts — 

But a direct and analytic sum 

Of all the worth and first effects of arts. 

And for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life 

That it shall gather strength of life with being, 

And live hereafter, more admired than now. 

Tibullus gives Virgil equal credit for having in his writ- 
ings touched with telling truth upon every vicissitude 
of human existence. 

That which he hath writ 
Is with such judgment laboured and distilled 
Through all the needful uses of our lives 
That, could a man remember but his lines, 
He should not touch at any serious point 
But he might breathe his spirit out of him.^ 

Finally, in the play, Virgil, at Caesar's invitation, judges 
between Horace and his libellers, and it is he who ad- 

^ These expressions were at any rate accepted as applicable to Shake- 
speare by the writer of the preface to the dramatist's Troilus and Cressida 
(1609). The preface includes the sentences: 'this author's [i.e. Shake- 
speare's] comedies are so framed to the life, that they serve for the most 
common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, showing such a 
dexterity and power of wit,' 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 351 

vises the administration of purging hellebore to Marston 
(Crispinus), the chief offender.^ 

On the other hand, one contemporary witness has 
been held to testify that Shakespeare stemmed the tide 
of Jonson's embittered activity by no peace- 
making interposition, but by joining his foes, turn from 
and by administering to him, with their aid, Parnassus,' 
much the same course of medicine which in the 
'Poetaster' is meted out to his enemies. In the same 
year (1601) as the 'Poetaster' was produced, and before 
the literary war had burnt itself out on the London 
stage, 'The Return from Parnassus' — the last piece in 
a trilogy of plays — was ' acted by the students in St. 
John's College, Cambridge.' It was an ironical review 
of the current life and aspirations of London poets, actors, 
and dramatists. In this piece, as in its two predecessors, 
Shakespeare received, both as a playwright and a poet, 
much commendation in his own name. His poems, even 
if one character held that they reflected somewhat too 
largely 'love's lazy foolish languishment,' were hailed 
by others as the perfect expression of amorous sentiment. 
The actor Burbage was introduced in his own name in- 
structing an aspirant to the actor's profession in the part 
of Richard the Third, and the familiar lines from Shake- 
speare's play — 

Now is the winter of our discontent 

Made glorious summer by this sun of York — 

were recited by the pupil as part oT his lesson. Subse- 
quently, in a prose dialogue between Shakespeare's fel- 
low-actors Burbage and Kemp, the latter generally dis- 
parages university dramatists who are wont to air their 
classical learning, and claims for Shakespeare, his theatri- 
cal colleague, a complete ascendancy over them. ' Why, 
here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down [Kemp 

1 The proposed identification of Virgil in the Poetaster with Chap- 
man has little to recommend it. Chapman's literary work did not 
justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play. 



352 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

remarks] ; aye, and Ben Jonson, too. O ! that Ben 
Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace, 
giving the poets a pill ; but our fellow Shakespeare hath 
given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.' 
Burbage adds: 'It's a shrewd fellow indeed.' This 
perplexing passage has been held to mean that Shake- 
speare took a decisive part against Jonson in the con- 
troversy with Marston, Dekker, and their friends. But 
such a conclusion is nowhere corroborated, and 
speare's sccms to be coufutcd by the eulogies of Virgil 
alleged jjj ^]^g 'Poetaster' and even by the general 

purge. , • 

handling of the theme in 'Hamlet.' The 
words quoted from 'The Return from Parnassus' may 
well be incapable of a literal interpretation. Probably 
the 'purge' that Shakespeare was alleged by the author 
of 'The Return from Parnassus' to have given Jonson 
meant no more than that Shakespeare had signally 
outstripped Jonson in popular esteem. As the author 
of 'Julius Ceesar/ he had just proved his command of 
topics that were peculiarly suited to Jonson's classicised 
vein,^ and had in fact outrun his churlish comrade on his 

^ The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed 
on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in Julius 
Casar, and as Jonson's attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, 
it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other con- 
siderations. 'Many times,' Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his Timber, 
' hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter : As when 
hee said in the person of CcBsar, one speaking to him [i.e. Csesar] ; Casar, 
thou dost me wrong. Hee [i.e. Caesar] replyed : Casar did never wrong, 
butt with just cause: and such like, which were ridiculous.' Jonson 
derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to The Staple of 
News (1625) : 'Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.' 
Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to' Shakespeare's char- 
acter of Casar appeared in the original version of the play, but owing 
perhaps to Jonson's captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio 
version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there 
that correspond with Jonson's quotation are Caesar's remark : 

Know, Csesar doth not wrong, nor without cause 
Will he be satisfied 

(ill. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion 
after the word 'wrong' of the phrase 'but with just cause,' which Jon- 
son needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shake- 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 353 

own ground. Shakespeare was, too, on the point of 
dealing in a new play a crushing blow at the pretensions 
of all who reckoned themselves his masters. 

Soon after the production of 'Julius Ctesar' Shake- 
speare completed the first draft of a tragedy which 
finally left Jonson and all friends and foes 'Hamlet,' 
lagging far behind him in reputation. This ^^°^- 
new exhibition of the force of his genius re-established, 
too, the ascendency of the adult actors who interpreted 
his work, and the boys' supremacy was jeopardised. 
Early in the second year of the seventeenth century 
Shakespeare produced 'Hamlet,' ' that piece of his which 
most kindled English hearts.' 

As in the case of so many of Shakespeare's plots, the 
story of his prince of Denmark was in its main outlines of 
ancient origin, was well known in contemporary ^^j^^ 
France, and had been turned to dramatic pur- Danish 
pose in England before he apphed his pen to it. ^^^" ' 
The rudimentary tale of a prince's vengeance on an 
uncle who has slain his royal father is a mediaeval tra- 
dition of pre-Christian Denmark. As early as the 
thirteenth century the Danish chronicler, Saxo Gram- 
maticus, embodied Hamlet's legendary history in his 
'Historia Danica,' which was first printed in 1514. 
Saxo's unsophisticated and barbaric narrative found in 
1570 a place in 'Les Histoires Tragiques,' a French mis- 
cellany of translated legend or romance by Pierre de 
Belleforest.^ The French collection of tales was fa- 
miHar to Shakespeare and to many other dramatists of 

speare's admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity in the 
theatre of Shakespeare's Julius CcBsar to Ben Jonson's Roman play of 
Catiline, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's 
death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems) ; see p. 589 n. 2 
infra. 

^ Histoire No. cviii. Cf. Gericke und Max Moltke, Hamlet-Quellen, 
Leipzig, 1881. Saxo Grammaticus's Historia Danica, bks. i.-ix., ap- 
peared in an English translation by Prof. Oliver Elton with an intro- 
duction by Prof. York Powell in 1894 (Folklore Soc. vol. 33). Hamlet's 
story was absorbed into Icelandic mythology; cf. Ambales Saga, ed. by 
Prof. Israel Gollancz, 1898. 



354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the day. No English translation of Belief orest's French 
version of Hamlet's history seems to have been avail- 
able when Shakespeare attacked the theme. -^ But a 
dramatic adaptation was already at his disposal in his 
own tongue. 

The primordial Danish version of the 'Hamlet' story, 
which the French rendering literally follows, is a relic of 
The bar- heathenish barbarism, and the dramatic pro- 
barism of ccsscs of purgation which Shakespeare perfected 
t e egen . ^gj-g clearly begun by another hand. The pre- 
tence of madness on the part of the young prince who 
seeks to avenge his father's murder is a central feature 
of the fable in all its forms, but in the original version 
the motive develops without much purpose in a repulsive 
environment of unqualified brutality. Horwendill, King 
of Denmark, the father of the hero Amleth, was accord- 
ing to Saxo craftily slain in a riot by his brother Fengon, 
who thereupon seized the crown and married Geruth 
the hero's mother. In order to protect himself against 
the new King's malice, Amleth, an only child who has 
a foster brother Osric, deliberately feigns madness, 
without very perceptibly affecting the situation. The 
usurper suborns a beautiful maiden to tempt Amleth at 
the same time as she tests the genuineness of his malady. 
Subsequently his mother is induced by King Fengon to 
pacify Amleth's fears ; but in the interview the son brings 
home to Geruth a sense of her infamy, after he has slain 
in her presence the prying chamberlain of the court. 
Amleth gives evidence of a savagery, which harmonises 
with his surroundings, by dismembering the dead body, 
boiling the fragments and flinging them to the hogs to eat. 
Thereupon the uncle sends his nephew to England to 
be murdered ; but Amleth turns the tables on his guards, 
effects their death, marries the English King's daughter, 

^ The Historic of Hamblett, an English prose translation of Belief orest, 
appeared in 1608. It was doubtless one of many tributes to the interest 
in the topic which Shakespeare's drama stimulated among his fellow- 
countrymen. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 355 

and returns to the Danish Court to find his funeral in 
course of celebration. He succeeds in setting fire to the 
palace and he kills his uncle while he is seeking to escape 
the flames. Amleth finally becomes King of Denmark, 
only to encounter a fresh series of crude misadventures 
which issue in his violent death. 

Much reconstruction was obviously imperative before 
Hamlet's legendary experiences could be converted into 
tragedy of however rudimentary a type. Shakespeare 
was spared the pains of applying the first spade to the 
unpromising soil. The first Elizabethan play which pre- 
sented Hamlet's tragic fortunes has not survived, save 
possibly in a few fragments, which are imbedded in a 
piratical and crudely printed first edition of Shakespeare's 
later play, as well as in a free German adaptation of 
somewhat mysterious origin.^ But external evidence 
proves that an old piece called ' Hamlet ' was in existence 
in 1589 — soon after Shakespeare joined the theatrical 
profession. In that year the pamphleteer Tom The old 
Nashe credited a writer whom he called 'Eng- P^^y- 
Ksh Seneca' with the capacity of penning 'whole Ham- 
lets^ I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.' Nashe's 
'English Seneca' may be safely identified with Thomas 
Kyd, a dramatist whose bombastic and melodramatic 
'Spanish Tragedie, containing the lamentable end of 
Don Horatio and Bel-Imperia, with the pittiful death of 
olde Hieronimo,' was written about 1586, and held the 

^ See p. 362 infra. Der Bestrqfte Briidermord, oder Prinz Hamlet aus 
Dannemark, the German piece, which seems to preserve fragments of 
the old Hamlet, was first printed in Berlin in 1781 from a MS. in the 
Dresden library, dated 1710. The drama originally belonged to the 
repertory of one of the English companies touring early in Germany. 
The crude German piece, while apparently based on the old Hamlet, 
bears many signs of awkward revision in the light of Shakespeare's sub- 
sequent version. Much ingenuity has been devoted to a discussion of 
the precise relations of Der Bestrafte Brudermord to the First Quarto and 
Second Quarto texts of Shakespeare's Hamlet, as well as to the old lost 
play. (See A. Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany, cv. seq. ; 237 seq. ; Gus- 
tav Tanger in the Shakespeare Jahrbtich, xxiii. pp. 224 seq.; Wilhelm 
Creizenach in Modern Philology, Chicago, 1904-5, ii. 249-260; and 
M. Blakemore Evans, ibid. ii. 433-449). 



356 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

breathless attention of the average Elizabethan play- 
goer for at least a dozen years.^ Kyd's 'Spanish Trag- 
edie' anticipates with some skill the leading motive and 
an important part of the machinery of Shakespeare's 
play. Kyd's hero Hieronimo seeks to avenge the mur- 
der of his son Horatio in much the same spirit as Shake- 
speare's Prince Hamlet seeks to avenge his father's 
Kyd's death. Horatio, the friend of Shakespeare's 

authorship. Hamlet, is called after the victim of Kyd's 
tragedy. Hieronimo, moreover, by way of testing his 
suspicions of those whom he believes to be his son Ho- 
ratio's murderers, devises a play the performance of which 
is a crucial factor in the development of the plot. A 
ghost broods over the whole action in agreement with 
the common practice of the Latin tragedian Seneca. 
The most distinctive scenic devices of Shakespeare's 
tragedy manifestly lay within the range of Kyd's dra- 
matic faculty and experience. The Danish legend 
knew nothing of the ghost or the interpolated play. 
There is abundant external proof that in one scene of 
the lost play of 'Hamlet' the ghost of the hero's father 
exclaimed 'Hamlet, revenge.' Those words, indeed, 
deeply impressed the playgoing public in the last years 
of the sixteenth century and formed a popular catch- 
phrase in Elizabethan speech long before Shakespeare 
brought his genius to bear on the Danish tale. Kyd 
may justly be credited with the first invention of a play 
of 'Hamlet' on the tragic lines which Shakespeare's 
genius expanded and subtilised.^ 

^ According to Dekker's Satiromastix, Ben Jonson himself played 
the part of Hieronimo in the Spanish Tragedie on a provincial tour, 
when he first joined the profession. In 1602 Jonson made 'additions' 
to Kyd's popular piece, and thus tried to secure for it a fresh lease of 
life. (Kyd's Works, ed. Boas, Ixxxiv-v.) The superior triumph of 
Shakespeare's Hamlet in the same season may well have been regarded 
by Jonson's foes as another 'purging pill' for him. 

2 Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He 
places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the Taming of the Shrew the current 
catch-phrase 'Go by, Jeronimy,' which owed its currency to words in 
The Spanish Tragedie, Shakespeare, too, quotes verbatim a line from 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 357 

The old 'Hamlet' enjoyed in the London theatres 
almost as long a spell of favour as Kyd's 'Spanish 
Tragedie.' On June 9, 1594, it was revived at Revivals 
the Newington Butts theatre, when tKe Lord of the old 
Chamberlain's men, Shakespeare's company, amet. 
were co-operating there with the Lord Admiral's men.^ 
A little later Thomas Lodge, in a pamphlet called 'Wits 
Miserie' (1596), mentioned 'the ghost which cried so 
miserably at the Theator like an oister wife Hamlet 
revenge.'' Lodge's words suggest a fresh revival of the 
original piece at the Shoreditch playhouse. In the 
' Satiromastix ' of 1601 the blustering Captain Tucca 
mocks Horace (Ben Jonson) with the sentences: 'My 
name's Hamlet Revenge; thou hast been at Parris Gar- 
den, hast not ? ' ^ This gibe implies yet another re- 
vival of the old tragedy in 1601 at a third playhouse — 
the Paris Garden theatre. 

There is little reason to doubt that Shakespeare's new 
interpretation of the popular fable was first Therecep- 
acted at the Globe theatre in the early winter ^°" °^ 
of 1602, not long after the polemical 'Satiro- speare's 
mastix' had run its course on the same boards.^ tragedy. 
Burbage created the title role of the Prince of Denmark 

the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (i. i. 271) : 'In time the 
savage bull doth bear the yoke ' ; but Kyd practically borrowed that 
line from Watson's Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare 
may have met it first. 

^ Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 164. 

^ Horace [i.e. Jonson] replies that he has played 'Zulziman' at Paris 
Garden. 'Soliman' is the name of a character in the interpolated play 
scene of the Spanish Tragedie and also of the hero of another of Kyd's 
tragedies — Soliman and Perseda. 

^ Tucca's scornful mention of 'Hamlet' in Satiromastix was uttered 
on Shakespeare's stage by a fellow-actor in November 1601. Tucca's 
words presume that only the old play of Hamlet was then in existence, 
and that Shakespeare's own play on the subject had not yet seen the 
light. The dramatist's fellow players scored a very pronounced success 
with the production of Shakespeare's piece, and it was out of the ques- 
tion that they should make its hero's name a term of reproach after they 
had produced Shakespeare's tragedy. Some difficulty as to the date is 
suggested by the statement in all the printed versions of Shakespeare's 
Hamlet, beginning with the first quarto of 1603, that 'the tragedians 



358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

with impressive effect ; but the dramatic triumph was as 
warmly acknowledged by readers of the piece as by the 
spectators in the playhouse. An early appreciation is 
extant in the handwriting of the critical scholar Gabriel 
Harvey. Soon after the play was made accessible to 
readers, Harvey wrote of it thus : ' The younger sort 
Gabriel takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & 
Harvey's Adonis : but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of 
comment, jj^jnlet, Princc of Denmarke, haue it in them, 
to please the wiser sort.' ^ Many dramatists of repute 

of the city' had been lately forced to 'travel' in the country through 
the menacing rivalry of the boy actors in London. No positive evidence 
is at hand to prove any unusual provincial activity on the part of Shake- 
speare's company or any other company of men actors during the seasons 
of 1600 or of 1 60 1. Such partial research in municipal records as has 
yet been undertaken gives no specific indication that Shakespeare's 
company was out of London between 1597 and 1602, although three 
unspecified companies of actors are shown by the City Chamberlain's 
accounts to have visited Oxford in 1601. But the accessible knowledge 
of the men actors' provincial experience is too fragmentary to offer 
safe guidance as to their periods of absence from London. (See p. 83 
supra.) Examination of municipal records has shed much light on 
actors' country tours. But the research has not yet been exhaustive. 
The municipal archives ignore, moreover, the men's practice of per- 
forming at country fairs and at country houses, and few clues to such 
engagements survive. The absence of recorded testimony is not there- 
fore conclusive evidence of the failure of itinerant players to give pro- 
vincial performances during this or that season or in this or that place. 
Shakespeare's implication that the leading adult actors were much 
out of London in the course of the years 1 600-1 is in the circumstances 
worthier of acceptance than any inference from collateral negative 
premisses. 

^ The precise date at which Gabriel Harvey penned these sentences 
is difficult to determine. They figure in a long and disjointed series 
of autograph comments on current literature which Harvey inserted 
in a copy of Speght's edition of Chaucer published in 1598 (see Gabriel 
Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, pp. 232-3). Throughout 
the volume Harvey scattered many manuscript notes, and on the title- 
page and on the last page of the printed text he attached the date 1598 
to his own signature, sufficient proof that he acquired the book in the 
year of its publication. There is no ground for assuming that Harvey's 
mention of Hamlet was made in the same year. Francis Meres faUed 
to include Hamlet in the full list of Shakespeare's successful plays which 
he supplied late in 1598 in his Palladis Tamia; and Harvey, who was 
through life in the habit of scribbling in the margin of his books, clearly 
annotated his Speght's Chaucer at idle hours in the course of various 
years. Little which is of strict chronological pertinence is deducible 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 359 

were soon echoing lines from the successful piece, 
while familiar reference was made to 'mad Hamlet' 
by the pamphleteers. In the old play the ghost had 
excited popular enthusiasm ; in Shakespeare's Anthony 
tragedy the personality of the Prince of Den- Scoioker's 
mark riveted pubKc attention.. In 1604 one 
Anthony Scoloker published a poetical rhapsody called 
'Daiphantus or the Passions of Loue.' In an eccentric 
appeal 'To the Reader' the writer commends in general 
terms the comprehensive attractions of 'friendly Shake- 
speare's tragedies ' ; as for the piece of writing on which 
he was engaged he disavows the hope that it should 
'please all like prince Hamlet,' adding somewhat am- 
biguously 'then it were to be feared [it] would run mad.' 
In the course of the poem which follows the 'Epistle,' 
Scoloker, describing the maddening effects of love, credits 
his lover with emulating Hamlet's behaviour. He 

Puts off his clothes ; his shirt he only wears 
Much like mad- Hamlet. 

from the dates of publication of the poetical works, which he strings 
together in the long note containing the reference to Hamlet. One sen- 
tence 'The Earle of Essex much commendes Albion's England' might 
suggest at a first glance that Harvey was writing at any rate before 
February 1601, when the Earl of Essex was executed. Yet much of 
the context makes it plain that Harvey uses the present tense in the 
historic fashion. In a later sentence he includes in a list of ' our flourish- 
ing metricians' the poet Watson, who was dead in 1592. He wrote of 
Watson in the present tense long after the poet ceased to live. A suc- 
ceeding laudatory mention of John Owen's New Epigrams which were 
first published in 1606 supports the inference that Harvey penned his 
note several years after Speght's Chaucer was acquired. No light is 
therefore thrown by Harvey on the precise date of the composition or 
of the first performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Harvey's copy of 
Speght's Chaucer (1598) was in the eighteenth century in the possession 
of Dr. Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore. George Steevens, in his 
edition of Shakespeare, 1773, cited the manuscript note respecting 
Hamlet while the book formed part of Bishop Percy's library, and Malone 
commented on Steevens's transcript in letters to Bishop Percy and in 
his Variorum edition, 1821, ii. 369 (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Memoranda 
on Hamlet, 1879, PP- 46-9). The volume, which was for a long time 
assumed to be destroyed, now belongs to Miss Meade, great-grand- 
daughter of Bishop Percy. The whole of Harvey's note is reproduced 
in facsimile and is fully annotated in Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. 
G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-on-Avon, 1913). 



360 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Parodying Hamlet's speech to the players, Scoloker's 
hero calls 'players fools' and threatens to 'learn them 
action.' ^ Thus as early as 1604 Shakespeare's recon- 
struction of the old play was receiving explicit marks of 
popular esteem. 

The bibliography of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' offers a 
puzzling problem. On July 26, 1602, 'A Book called the 
Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as it 
lein oFits" was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his 
pubiica- Servants,' was entered on the Stationers' 
Company's Registers by the printer James 
Roberts, and it was published in quarto next year by 
N[icholas] L[ing] and John Trundell.^ The title-page 
The First ^^^ ' ' ^^^ Tragicall Historic of Hamlet Prince 
Quarto, of Dcnmarke. By William Shakespeare. As 
^^°^" it hath beene diuerse times acted by his High- 

nesse Seruants in the Cittie of London as also in the 

^ Scoloker's work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in 1880. 
2 Although James Roberts obtained on July 26, 1602, the Stationers' 
Company's license for the publication of Hamlet, and although he printed 
the Second Quarto of 1604, he had no hand in the First Quarto of 1603, 
which was in all regards a piracy. Its chief promoter was Nicholas 
Ling, a bookseller and publisher, not a printer, who had taken up his 
freedom as a stationer in 1579, and was called into the livery in 1598. 
He was himself a man of letters, having designed a series of collected 
aphorisms in four volumes, of which the second was the well-known 
Palladis Tamia (1598) by Francis Meres. Ling compiled and published 
both the first volume of the series called Politeupheuia (1597), and the 
third called Wit's Theatre of the Little World (1599). In 1607 he tem- 
porarily acquired some interest in the publication of Shakespeare's 
Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet (Arber, iii. 337, 365). With 
Ling there was associated in the unprincipled venture of the First Quarto 
of Hamlet, John Trundell, a stationer of small account. He took up 
his freedom as a stationer on October 29, 1597, but the Hamlet of 1603 
was the earliest volume on the title-page of which he figured. He had 
no other connection with Shakespeare's works. Ben Jonson derisively 
introduced Trundell's name as that of a notorious dealer in broadside 
ballads into Every Man in his Humour (i. ii. 63 folio edition, 1616). 
The printer of the First Quarto, who is unnamed on the title-page, has 
been identified with Valentine Simmes, who was often in difi&culties for 
unlicensed and irregular printing. But Simmes had much experience 
in printing Shakespeare's plays ; from his press came the First Quartos 
, of Richard III (1597), Richard II (1597), 2 Henry IV (1600), and Mtich 
Ado (1600). (Cf. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 
73 seq. ; Mr. H, R. Plomer in Library, April 1906, pp. 153-5.) 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 361 

two Uniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else- 
where.' The Lord Chamberlain's servants were not 
known as ' His Highnesse seruants ' — the designation 
bestowed on them on the title-page — before their f9r- 
mal enrolment as King James's players on May 19, 
1603.^ It was therefore after that date that the First 
Quarto saw the light.- 

The First Quarto of ' Hamlet ' was a surreptitious issue. 
The text is crude and imperfect, and there is little doubt 
that it was prepared from shorthand notes xhe defects 
taken from the actor's lips during an early of the First 
performance at the theatre. But the dis- ^^^^^°- 
crepancies between its text and that of more authentic 
editions of a later date cannot all be assigned to the 
incompetence of the 'copy' from which the printer 
worked. The numerous divergences touch points of 
construction which are beyond the scope of a reporter 
or a copyist. The transcript followed, however lamely, 
a draft of the piece which was radically revised before 
'Hamlet' appeared in print again. 

The First Quarto furnishes 2143 lines — scarcely half 
as many as the Second Quarto, which gives the play 
substantially its accepted form. Several of the charac- 
ters appear in the First Quarto under unfamiliar names ; 

^ See p. 375 infra. 

2 The further statement on the title-page, that the piece was acted 
not only in the City of London but at the Universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge, is perplexing. At both Oxford and Cambridge the academic 
authorities did all they could, from 1589 onwards, to prevent perform- 
ances by the touring companies within the University precincts. The 
Vice-Chancellor made it a practice to bribe visiting actors with sums 
varying from ten to forty shillings to refrain from playing. The munici- 
pal officers did not, however, share the prejudice of their academic 
neighbours, and according to the accounts of the City Chamberlain, 
as many as three companies, which the documents unluckily omit to 
specify individually by name, gave performances in the City of Oxford 
during the year 1600— i. It was only the towns of Oxford and Cambridge 
and not the universities themselves which could have given Shakespeare's 
Hamlet an early welcome. The misrepresentation on the title-page is in 
keeping with the general inaccuracy of the First Quarto text. (See 
F. S. Boas, 'Hamlet at the Universities' in Fortnightly Review, August 
1913, and his U^iiversity Drama, 1914.) 



362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Polonius is called Corambis, Reynaldo Montano.' Some 
notable speeches — ^ ' To be or not to be ' for 
speare's example — appear at a different stage of the 
first rough action from that which was finally allotted 
them. One scene (11. 1247-82) has no counter- 
part in other editions ; there the Queen suffers herself to 
be convinced by Horatio of her second husband's in- 
famous character; in signal conflict with her attitude 
of mind in the subsequent version, she acknowledges 

treason in his [i.e. King Claudius's] lookes 
That seem'd to sugar or'e his villanie. 

Through the last three acts the rhythm of the blank verse 
and the vocabulary are often reminiscent of Kyd's ac- 
knowledged work,^ and lack obvious affinity with Shake- 
speare's style. The collective evidence suggests that 
the First Quarto presents with much typographical dis- 
figurement Shakespeare's first experiment with the 
theme. His design of a sweeping reconstruction of the 
old play was not fully worked out, and a few fragments of 
the original material were suffered for the time to remain.^ 
A revised edition of Shakespeare's work, printed from 

^ Osric is only known as 'A Braggart Gentleman' and Francisco 
'A sentinel,' but here the shorthand note taker may have failed to catch 
the specific names. 

^ Kyd's Works, ed. Boas, pp. xlv-liv — 'The Ur-Hamlet'; cf. G. 
Sarrazin, 'Entstehung der Hamlet-tragodie ' in Anglia xii-iv. 

3 No other theory fits the conditions of the problem. Both omissions 
and interpolations make it clear that the transcriber of the First Quarto 
was not dependent on Shakespeare's final version, nor is there ground 
for crediting the transcriber with the ability to foist by his own initiative 
reminiscences of the old piece on a defective shorthand report of Shake- 
speare's complete play. An internal discrepancy of construction which 
Shakespeare's later version failed to remove touches the death of Ophelia. 
According to the Queen's familiar speech (iv. vii. 167-84) the girl is the 
fatal victim of a pure accident. The bough of a willow tree, on which 
she rests while serenely gathering wild flowers, snaps and flings her into 
the brook where she is drowned. Yet in the scene of her burial all the 
references to her death assume that she committed suicide. It looks 
as if in the old play Ophelia took her own life, and that while Shake- 
speare altered her mode of death in act iv. sc. vii. he failed to reconcile 
with the change the comment on Ophelia's end in act v. sc. i. which 
echoed the original drama. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 363 

a far more complete and accurate manuscript, was pub- 
lished in 1604. This quarto volume bore the title : 'The 
Tragicall Historic of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, by 
William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged 
to almost as much againe as it was, according to the 
true and perfect coppie.' The printer was I[ames] 
R[oberts] and the publisher N[icholas] L[ing].'^ The con- 
cluding words — -'according to the true and per- The Second 
feet coppie ' — ■ of the title-page of the Second Quarto, 
Quarto authoritatively stamped its predecessor ^ °'*' 
as surreptitious and unauthentic. A second impression 
of the Second Quarto of 'Hamlet' bore the date 1605, 
but was otherwise unaltered. Ling, the publisher of the 
First Quarto, and not Roberts, the original licensee and 
printer of the Second Quarto, would seem to have been 
recognised as owner of copyright in the piece. On 
November 19, 1607, there was transferred, with other 
literary property, to a different publisher, John Smeth- 
wick, 'A booke called Hamlet . . . Whiche dyd be- 
longe to Nicholas Lynge.' " Smethwick published a 
Fourth Quarto of 'Hamlet' in 161 1 as well as a Fifth 
Quarto which was undated. Both follow the guidance 
of the Second Quarto. The Second Quarto is carelessly 
printed and awkwardly punctuated, and there are signs 
that the 'copy' had been curtailed for acting purposes. 
But the Second Quarto presents the fullest of all extant 
versions of the play. It numbers nearly 4000 Hnes, and 
is by far the longest of Shakespeare's dramas.^ 

^ The printer of the Second Quarto, James Roberts, who held the 
Stationers' Company's license of July 26, 1602 for the publication of 
Hamlet, had clearly come to terms with Nicholas Ling, the piratical 
publisher of the First Quarto. Roberts, who was printer and publisher 
of 'the players' bills,' had been concerned in 1600 in the publication of 
Titus Andronicus (see p. 132), of the Merchant of Venice (see p. 137 n. 2), 
and of the Midsummer Night's Dream (see p. 231 n.). He also obtained a 
license for the publication of Troilus and Cressida in 1603 (see pp. 365-6). 

2 Stationers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 365. 

^ Hamlet is thus some three hundred lines longer than Richard III 
— the play by Shakespeare that approaches it most closely in numerical 
strength of lines. 



364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

A third version (long the textus receptus) figured in the 
FoHo of 1623. Here some hundred Hnes which are want- 
The First ^^S i^ the quartos appear for the first time. 
Folio The FoHo's additions include the full account 

Version. ^^ ^^^q quarrel between the men actors and the 
boys, and some uncomplimentary references to Denmark 
in the same scene. Both these passages may well have 
been omitted from the Second Quarto of 1604 in defer- 
ence to James I's Queen Anne, who was a Danish prin- 
cess and an active patroness of the 'children-players.' 
At the same time more than two hundred Hnes which 
figure in the Second Quarto are omitted from the Folio. 
Among the deleted passages is one of Hamlet's most 
characteristic soliloquies ('How all occasions do inform 
against me') with the preliminary observations which 
give him his cue (iv. iv. 9-66). The FoKo text clearly 
followed an acting copy which had been abbreviated 
somewhat more drastically than the Second Quarto and 
in a different fashion.^ But the printers did their work 
more accurately than their predecessors. A collation of 
the First FoHo with the Second Quarto is essential to the 
formation of a satisfactory text of the play. An en- 
deavour of the kind was first made on scholarly Hnes by 
Lewis Theobald in his 'Shakespeare Restor'd' (1726). 
Theobald's text, with further embelHshments by Sir 
Thomas Hanmer, Edward CapeH, and the Cambridge 
editors of 1866, is now generally adopted. 

Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' has since its first production 

attracted more attention from actors, playgoers, and 

readers of all capacities than any other of his 

popuiarfty plays. From no piece of Hterature have so 

of , many phrases passed into colloquial speech. 

^^ ^ ' Its world-wide popularity from its author's day 
to our own, when it is as warmly welcomed in the theatres 

1 C!. Hamlet — parallel texts of the First and Second Quarto, and 
First Folio — ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, iSgi; The Devonshire 
Hamlets, i860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam 
T immin s. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 365 

of France and Germany as in those of the British Empire 
and America, is the most striking of the many testi- 
monies to the eminence of Shakespeare's dramatic in- 
stinct. The old barbarous legend has been transfigured, 
and its coarse brutalities are sublimated in a new atmos- 
phere of subtle thought. At a first glance there seems 
little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unre- 
flecting. Shakespeare's ' Hamlet ' is mainly a psychologi- 
cal effort, a study of the reflective temperament in excess. 
The action develops slowly ; at times there is no movement 
at all. The piece in its final shape is not only the longest 
of Shakespeare's dramas, but the total length of Hamlet's 
speeches far exceeds that of those allotted by Shake- 
speare to any other of his characters. Humorous and 
quite original relief is effectively supplied to the tragic 
theme by the garrulities of Polonius and the rustic 
grave-diggers. The controversial references to contem- 
porary theatrical history (11. ii. 350-89) could only count 
on a patient hearing from a sympathetic Elizabethan 
audience, but the pungent censure of actors' perennial 
defects is calculated to catch the ear of the average 
playgoer of all ages. The minor characters are vividly 
elaborated. But it is not to these subsidiary features 
that the universality of the play's vogue can be attrib- 
uted. It is the intensity of interest which Shakespeare 
contrives to excite in the character of the hero that 
explains the position of the play in popular esteem. 
The play's unrivalled power of attraction lies in the 
pathetic fascination exerted on minds of almost every 
calibre by the central figure — a high-born youth of 
chivalric instincts and finely developed intellect, who, 
when stirred to avenge in action a desperate private 
wrong, is foiled by introspective workings of the brain 
that paralyse the will. The pedigree of the conception 
flings a flood of light on the magical property of Shake- 
speare's individual genius. 

Although the difficulties of determining the date of 
'Troilus and Cressida' are very great, there are many 



366 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

grounds for assigning its composition to the early days 
of 1603. Four years before, in 1599, the dramatists 
'Troiius Dekker and Chettle were engaged by Philip 
and Henslowe to prepare a play of identical name for 

Cressida.' ^j^^ -^^^^ ^^ Nottingham's (formerly the Lord 

Admiral's) company — the chief rival of Shakespeare's 
company among the men actors. Of the pre-Shake- 
spearean drama of 'Troilus and Cressida,' only a frag- 
ment of the plot or scenario survives. There is small 
doubt that that piece suggested the topic to Shakespeare, 
although he did not follow it closely.^ On February 7, 
1602-3, James Roberts, the original licensee of Shake- 
speare's 'Hamlet,' obtained a license for 'the booke of 
"Troilus and Cresseda" as yt is acted by my Lord 
Chamberlens men {i.e. Shakespeare's company),^ to 
print when he has gotten sufficient authority for it.' 
Roberts's 'book' was probably Shakespeare's play. 
Roberts, who printed the Second Quarto of 'Hamlet' 
and others of Shakespeare's plays, failed in his effort to 
send 'Troilus' to press. The interposition of the players 
for the time defeated his effort to get 'sufficient author- 
ity for it.' But the metrical characteristics of Shake- 
speare's ' Troilus and Cressida ' — the regularity of the 
blank verse — powerfully confirm the date of composi- 
tion which Roberts's abortive license suggests. Six 
years later, however, on January 28, 1608-9, ^ ^^w license 
for the issue of 'a booke called the history of Troylus 
and Cressida' was granted to other publishers, Richard 
Bonian and Henry Walley,^ and these publishers, more for- 
tunate than Roberts, soon issued a quarto bearing on the 
title-page Shakespeare's full name as author and the date 

^ The 'plot' of a play on the subject of Troilus and Cressida which 
may be attributed to Dekker and Chettle is preserved in the British 
Museum MSS. Addit. 10449 f. 5. This was first printed in Henslowe 
Papers, ed. Greg, p. 142. Eleven lines in the 1610 edition of Histrio- 
mastix (Act iii. 11. 269-79) parody a scene in Shakespeare's Troths 
(v. ii.). Histriomastix was first produced in 1599. The passage in the 
edition of 16 10 is clearly an interpolation of uncertain date and gives 
no clue to the year of composition or production of Shakespeare's piece. 

2 Stationers' Company's Registers, ed. Arber, iii. 226. ^ Ibid., 400. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 367 

1609. The volume was printed by George Eld, but the 
typography is not a good specimen of his customary skill. 
Exceptional obscurity attaches to the circumstances 
of the pubhcation. Some copies of the book bear an 
ordinary type of title-page stating that 'The xhepub- 
Historie of Troylus and Cresseida' was printed Ucation 
'as it was acted by the King's Majesties °f '^°9- 
seruants at the Globe,' and that it was 'written by Wil- 
liam Shakespeare.' But in other copies, which differ 
in no way in regard either to the text of the play or to 
the pubHshers' imprint, there was substituted a more 
pretentious title-page running : ' The famous Historic 
of Troylus and Cresseid, excellently expressing the be- 
ginning of their loues with the conceited wooing of Pan- 
darus, prince of Licia, written by William Shakespeare.' 
This pompous description was followed, for the first and 
only time in the case of a play by Shakespeare pubHshed 
in his Hfetime, by an advertisement or preface super- 
scribed 'A never writer to an ever reader. News.' The 
anonymous pen supplies in the interest of the publishers 
a series of high-flown but well-deserved compliments 
to Shakespeare as a writer of comedies.^ 'Troilus and 
Cressida' was declared to be the equal of the best work 

^ The tribute is worthy of note. The most eulogistic sentences 
run thus : ' Were but the vain names of comedies changed for titles 
of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand 
censors that now style them such vanities flock to them for the main 
grace of their gravities; especially this author's comedies that are so 
framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries 
of all the actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power of 
wit, that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. 
And all such dull and heavy witted worldlings as were never capable 
of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations 
have found that wit that they never found in themselves, and have 
parted better witted than they came; feeling an edge of wit set upon 
them more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on. So 
much and such savoured salt of wit is in his comedies, that they seem 
(for their height of pleasure) to be born in that sea that brought forth 
Venus. Amongst all there is none more witty than this : and had I 
time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs not (for so much 
as will make you think your testern well bestowed) ; but for so much 
worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it, deserves such a labour as 
well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus.' 



368 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of Terence and Plautus, and there was defiant boasting 
that the 'grand possessors' — i.e. the theatrical owners — • 
of the manuscript deprecated its pubhcation. By way 
of enhancing the value of what were obviously stolen 
wares, it was falsely added that the piece was new and 
unacted, that it was 'a new play never staled with the 
stage, never clapperclawed with the palms of the vulgar.' 
The purchaser was adjured : ' Refuse not nor like this 
the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath of 
the multitude.' This address was possibly a brazen 
reply of the pubHshers to a more than usu'ally emphatic 
protest on the part of players or dramatist against the 
printing of the piece. The 'copy' seemed to follow a 
The First vcrsion of the play which had escaped theatrical 
Folio revision or curtailment, and may have reached 

the press with the corrupt connivance of a 
scrivener in the authors' and managers' confidence. 
The editors of the First Folio evinced distrust of the 
Quarto edition by printing their text from a different 
copy, but its deviations were not always for the better. 
The Folio 'copy,' however, supplied Shakespeare's 
prologue to the play for the first time.^ 

The work, which in point of construction shows signs 
of haste, and in style is exceptionally unequal, is the 
Treatment ^^^st attractive of the efforts of Shakespeare's 
of the middle life. In matter and manner 'Troilus 

^^^' and Cressida' combines characteristic features 
of its author's early and late performances. His imagery 

^ A curious uncertainty as to the place which the piece should occupy- 
in their volume was evinced by the First Folio editors. They began 
by printing it in their section of tragedies after Romeo and Juliet. With 
that tragedy of love Troilus and Cressida's cynical denoument awk- 
wardly contrasts, nor is the play, strictly speaking, a tragedy. Both 
hero and heroine leave the scene alive, and the death in the closing 
pages of Hector at Achilles' hand is no regular climax. Ultimately 
the piece was given a detached place without pagination between the 
close of the section of 'Histories' and the opening of the section of 
'Tragedies.' The editors' perplexities are reflected in their preliminary 
table or catalogue of contents, in which Troilus and Cressida finds no 
mention at all. See First Folio Facsimile, ed. Sidney Lee, Introduction, 
xxvii-xxix. 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 369 

is sometimes as fantastic as in ' Romeo and Juliet ' ; 
elsewhere his intuition is as penetrating as in 'King Lear.' 
The problem resembles that which is presented by ' All's 
Well ' and may be solved by the assumption that the play 
was begun by Shakespeare in his early days, and was 
completed in the season of maturity. The treatment 
of the strange Trojan love story from which the piece 
takes its name savours of Shakespeare's youthful hand, 
while the complementary scenes, which the Greek leaders 
and soldiers dominate, bear trace of a more mature pen. 

The story is based not on the Homeric poem of Troy 
but on a romantic legend of the Trojan war, which 
a fertile medieeval imagination quite irrespon- source of 
sibly wove round Homeric names. Both the plot. 
Troilus, the type of loyal love, and Cressida, the type 
of perjured love, were children of the twelfth century 
and of no classical era. The literature of the Middle 
Ages first gave them their general fame, which the lit- 
erature of the Renaissance steadily developed. 

Boccaccio first bestowed literary form on the tale of 
Troilus and his fickle mistress in his epic of ' Filostrato ' of 
1348, and on that foundation Chaucer built his touching 
poem of ' Troylus and Criseyde ' — the longest of all his 
poetic narratives. To Chaucer the story owed its wide 
English vogue ^ and from him Shakespeare's love story 
in the play took its cue. No pair of lovers is more 
often cited than Troilus and his faithless mistress by 
Elizabethan poets, and Shakespeare, long before he 
finished his play, introduced their names in familiar 
allusion in ' The Merchant of Venice ' (v. i. 4) and in 
'Twelfth Night' (iii. i. 59). The mihtary and political 
episodes in the wars of Trojans and Greeks, with which 
Shakespeare encircles his romance, are traceable to two 
mediaeval books easily accessible to Elizabethans, which 

^ Cressida's name in Benoit de Ste. More's Roman de Troyes, where 
her story was first told in the twelfth century, appears as Briseide, a 
derivative from the Homeric Briseis. Boccaccio converted the name into 
Griseide and Chaucer into Criseyde, whence Cressida easily developed. 



370 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

both adapt in different ways the far famed Guido 
della Colonna's fantastic reconstruction or expansion of 
the Homeric myth in the thirteenth century ; the first 
of these authorities was Lydgate's 'Troy booke/ a 
long verse rendering of Colonna's 'Historia Trojana,' 
and the second was Caxton's 'Recuyell of the his- 
tory es of Troy/ a prose translation of a French epitome 
of Colonna. Shakespeare may have read the first in- 
stalment of Chapman's great translation of Homer's 
Shake Hiad, of which two volumes appeared in 1598 
speare's — One containing seven books (i. ii. vii. viii. ix. 
of a'medi-^ ^- ^^■} ^nd the other, called 'Achilles' Shield,' 
sevai containing book xviii. But the drama owed 

ra 1 ion. j^q thing to Homer's epic. Its picture of the 
Homeric world was a fruit of the mediaeval falsifications. 
At one point the dramatist diverges from his authorities 
with notable originality. Cressida figures in his play as 
a heartless coquette; the poets who had previously 
treated her story — Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and 
Robert Henryson, the Scottish writer who echoed 
Chaucer — had imagined her as a tender-hearted, if 
frail, beauty, with claims on their pity rather than on 
their scorn. But Shakespeare's innovation is dramati- 
cally effective, and deprives fickleness in love of any false 
glamour. It is impossible to sustain the charge fre- 
quently brought against the dramatist that he gave proof 
of a new and original vein of cynicism, when, in ' Troilus 
and Cressida,' he disparaged the Greek heroes of classical 
antiquity by investing them with contemptible char- 
acteristics. Guido della Colonna and the authorities 
whom Shakespeare followed invariably condemn Homer's 
glorification of the Greeks and depreciate their characters 
and exploits. Shakespeare indeed does the Greek chief- 
tains Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon a better justice 
than his guides, for whatever those veterans' moral 
defects he concentrated in their speeches a marvellous 
wealth of pithily expressed philosophy, much of which has 
fortunately obtained proverbial currency. Otherwise 



MATURITY OF GENIUS 37 1 

Shakespeare's conception of the Greeks ran on the tradi- 
tional mediaeval lines. His presentation of Achilles as a 
brutal coward is entirely loyal to the spirit of Guido della 
Colonna, whose veracity was unquestioned by Shake- 
speare or his tutors. Shakespeare's portrait interpreted 
the selfish, unreasoning, and exorbitant pride with which 
the warrior was credited by Homer's mediaeval expositors. 
Shakespeare's treatment of his theme cannot therefore 
be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a 
petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the 
ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their lit- 
erature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben 
Jonson and Chapman. Irony at the expense of classi- 
cal hero-worship was a common note of the Middle Ages. 
Shakespeare had already caught a touch of it when he por- 
trayed Julius Caesar, not in the fulness of the Dictator's 
powers, but in a pitiable condition of physical and men- 
tal decrepitude, and he was subsequently to show his 
tolerance of prescriptive habits of disparagement by con- 
tributing to the two pseudo-classical pieces of ' Pericles ' 
and ' Timon of Athens.' Shakespeare worked in ' Troilus 
and Cressida' over well-seasoned specimens of medieeval 
romance, which were uninfluenced by the true classical 
spirit. Mediaeval romance adumbrated at all points 
Shakespeare's unheroic treatment of the Homeric heroes.^ 

^ Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by F. G. 
Fleay and George Wyndham to treat Troilus and Cressida as Shake- 
speare's contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between 
Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor- 
friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement 
against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up 
Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced with 
equal bitterness Marston, despite Marston's antagonism to Jonson, 
which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson's foes. The con- 
troversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for 
Troilus cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war 
between Jonson, Dekker, and Marston, in 1601-2), and it seems con- 
futed by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the 
theatrical conflict (see pp. 342 seq. and especially pp. 349-50). Another 
untenable theory represents Troilus and Cressida as a splenetic attack 
on George Chapman, the translator of Homer and champion of classical 
hterature (see Acheson's Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, 1903). 



XVII 

THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 

Despite the suspicions of sympathy with the Earl of 
Essex's revolt which the players of Shakespeare's corn- 
Last per- pany incurred and despite their stubborn 
formances controversy with the Children of the Chapel 
Queen Royal, Shakespeare and his colleagues main- 
EHzabeth. tained their hold on the favour of the Court 
till the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign. No political 
anxiety was suffered to interrupt the regular succession 
of their appearances on the royal stage. On Boxing 
Day 1600 and on the succeeding Twelfth Night, Shake- 
speare's company was at Whitehall rendering as usual 
a comedy or interlude each night. Within little more 
than a month Essex made his sorry attempt at rebellion 
in the City of London (on February 9, 1600-1) and on 
Shrove Tuesday (February 24) Queen Elizabeth signed 
her favourite's death warrant. Yet on the evening of 
that most critical day — barely a dozen hours before the 
Earl's execution within the precincts of the Tower of 
London — Shakespeare's band of players produced at 
Whitehall one more play in the sovereign's presence. 
As the disturbed year ended, the guests beneath the 
royal roof were exceptionally few,^ but the acting com- 
pany's exertions were not relaxed at Court. During the 
next Christmas season Shakespeare's company revisited 

^ Cf. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, vol. 283, no. 48 (Dudley 
Carleton to John Chamberlain, Dec. 29, 1601) : 'There has been such 
a small court this Christmas that the guard were not troubled to keep 
doors at the plays and pastimes.' Besides the plays at Court this Christ- 
mas the Queen witnessed one performed in her honour at Lord Hunsdon's 
house in Blackfriars, presumably by Shakespeare's company of which 
Lord Hunsdon, then Lord Chamberlain, was the patron {ibid.). 

372 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 373 

Whitehall no less than four times — on Boxing Day and 
St. John's Day (December 27, 1601) as well as on New 
Year's Day and Shrove Sunday (February 14, 1601-2).^ 
Their services were requisitioned once again on Boxing 
Day, 1602, but Queen Elizabeth's days were then at 
length numbered. On Candlemas Day (February 2) 
1602-3, the company travelled to Richmond, Surrey, 
whither the Queen had removed in vain hope of recover- 
ing her failing health, and there for the last time Shake- 
speare and his friends offered her a dramatic entertain- 
ment.^ She lived only seven weeks longer. On March 
24, 1602-3, she breathed her last at Richmond.^ 

The literary ambitions of Henry Chettle, Shakespeare's 
early eulogist and Robert Greene's publisher, had long 
withdrawn him from the publishing trade. At shake- 
the end of the century he was making a penuri- speare and 
ous livelihood by ministering with vast industry Queen's 
to the dramatic needs of the Lord Admiral's death. 
company of players. 'The London Florentine,' the 
last piece (now lost) which was prepared for presentation 
by the Lord Admiral's men before Queen Elizabeth 
early in March 1602-3, was from the pen of Chettle in 
partnership with Thomas Heywood, and for its render- 
ing at Court Chettle prepared a special prologue and 
epilogue."^ It was not unfitting that the favoured author 
should interrupt his dramatic labour in order to com- 
memorate the Queen's death. His tribute was a pastoral 
elegy (of mingled verse and prose) called 'England's 
Mourning Garment.' It appeared just after the Sover- 
eign's funeral in Westminster Abbey on April 28. Into 

1 E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. (1907), vol. ii. p. 12. 

2 Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 105 seq. ; Cunningham, 
Revels, xxxii. seq. 

^ After the last performance of Shakespeare's company at the Palace 
of Richmond and before the Queen's death, Edward Alleyn with the 
Lord Admiral's company twice acted before her there — once on Shrove 
Sunday (March 6), and again a day or two later on an unspecified date. 
See Tucker Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 138; Henslowe's 
Diary, ed. Greg, i. 17 1-3; Cunningham, Revels, xxxiv. 

* Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 173. 



374 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

his loyal panegyric the zealous elegist wove expressions 
of surprised regret that the best known poets of the day 
had withheld their pens from his own great theme. 
Under fanciful names in accordance with the pastoral 
convention, Chettle, who himself assumed Spenser's 
pastoral title of Colin, appealed to Daniel, Drayton, 
Chapman, Ben Jonson, and others to make Elizabeth's 
royal name 'live in their lively verse.' Nor was Shake- 
speare, whose progress Chettle had watched with sym- 
pathy, omitted from the list of neglectful singers. 'The 
silver-tongued Melicert' was the pastoral appellation 
under which Chettle lightly concealed the great dram- 
atist's identity. Deeply did he grieve that Shakespeare 
should forbear to 

Drop from his honied muse one sable teare, 
To mourne her death that graced his desert, 
And to his laies opened her royal eare. 

The apostrophe closed with the lines : 

Shepheard, remember our Elizabeth, 

And sing her Rape done by our Tarquin Death. 

The reference to Shakespeare's poem of 'Lucrece' left 
the reader in no doubt of the writer's meaning.^ But 
there were critics of the day who deemed Shakespeare 
better employed than on elegies of royalty. Testimonies 
to the worth of the late Queen flowed in abundance 
from the pens of ballad-mongers whose ineptitudes 
were held by many to profane 'great majesty.' A 
satiric wit heaped scorn on Chettle who 

calde to Shakespeare, Jonson, Greene 
To write of their dead noble Queene. 

Any who responded to the invitation, the satirist sug- 
gested, would deserve to suffer at the stake for poetical 
heresy.^ 

^ England's Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D. 3, reprinted in Shak- 
spere Allusion Books (New Shak. Soc. 1874), ed. C. M. Ingleby, p. 98. 

2 'Epigrams . . . By I. C. Gent.,' London [1604?], No. 12; see 
Shakspere Allusion Books, pp. 121-2. The author I. C. is unidentified. 
His reference to 'Greene' is to Thomas Greene, the popular comedian. 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 375 

Save on grounds of patriotic sentiment, the Queen's 
death justified no lamentation on the part of Shakespeare. 
He had no material reason for mourning, jamesi's 
On the withdrawal of one royal patron he and accession, 
his friends at once found another, who proved far more 
liberal and appreciative. Under the immediate auspices 
of the new King and Queen, dramatists and actors en- 
joyed a prosperity and a consideration which improved 
on every precedent. 

On May 19, 1603, James I, very soon after his acces- 
sion, extended to Shakespeare and other members of the 
Lord Chamberlain's company a very marked 
and valuable recognition. To them he granted patent to 
under royal letters patent a license 'freely shake- 
to use and exercise the arte and facultie of company, 
playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enter- ^^y ^9' 
ludes, moralls, pastoralles, stage-plaies, and 
such other hke as they have already studied, or hereafter 
shall use or studie as well for the recreation of our loving 
subjectes as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall 
thinke good to see them during our pleasure.' The Globe 
theatre was noted as the customary scene of their labours, 
but permission was granted to them to perform in the 
town-hall or moot-hall or other convenient place in 
any country town. Nine actors were alone mentioned 
individually by name. Other members of the com- 
pany were merely described as ' the rest of their asso- 
ciates.' Lawrence Fletcher stood first on the list; he 
had already performed before James in Scotland in 1599 
and 1601. Shakespeare came second and Burbage third. 
There followed Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, 
Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, shake- 
and Richard Cowley. The company to which speare as 
Shakespeare and his colleagues belonged was o/the 
thenceforth styled the King's company, its Chamber. 
members became 'the King's Servants.' In accordance, 
moreover, with a precedent created by Queen Elizabeth 
in 1583, they were numbered among the Grooms of the 



376 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Chamber.^ The like rank was conferred on the mem- 
bers of the company which was taken at the same time 
into the patronage of James I's Queen-consort Anne of 
Denmark, and among Queen Anne's new Grooms of the 
Chamber was the actor-dramatist Thomas Heywood, 
whose career was always running parallel with that of the 
great poet. Shakespeare's new status as a complemen- 
tary member of the royal household had material advan- 
tages. In that capacity he and his fellows received from 
time to time cloth wherewith to provide themselves 
liveries, and a small fixed salary of 525, 4d. a year. 
Gifts of varying amount were also made them at festive 
seasons by the controller of the royal purse at the Sov- 
ereign's pleasure and distinguished royal guests gave 
them presents. The household office of Groom of the 
Chamber was for the most part honorary,^ but occasionally 
the actors were required to perform the duties of Court 

^ The royal license of May 19, 1603, was first printed from the patent 
roll in Rymer's Fcedera (1715), xvi. 505, and has been very often re- 
printed (cf. Malone Soc. Coll. 1911, vol. i. 264). At the same time the 
Earl of Worcester's company, of which Thomas Heywood, the actor- 
dramatist, was a prominent member, was taken into the Queen's patron- 
age, and its members became the Queen's servants, and likewise ' Grooms 
of the Chamber,' while the Lord Admiral's (or the Earl of Nottingham's) 
company were taken into the patronage of Henry Prince of Wales, and 
its members were known as the Prince's Servants until his death in 161 2, 
when they were admitted into the 'service' of his brother-in-law the 
Elector Palatine. The remnants of the ill-fated company of Queen 
Elizabeth's Servants seem to have passed at her death first to the patron- 
age of Lodovick Stuart, Duke of Lenox, and then to Prince Charles, Duke 
of York, afterwards Prince of Wales and King Charles I (Murray's 
English Dramatic Companies, i. 228 seq.). This extended patronage of 
actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the 
King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his 
Time Triumphant, 1604, sig. B. 

2 See Dr. Mary Sullivan's Court Masques of James I (New York, 
191 3), where many new details are given from the Lord Chamberlain's 
and Lord Steward's records in regard to the pecuniary rewards of actors 
who were Grooms of the Chamber. The Queen's company, which was 
formed in 1583, but soon lost its prestige in London, had been previously 
allotted the same status of 'Grooms of the Chamber' on its formation 
(see p. 50 supra) . At the French Court at the end of the sixteenth cen- 
tury the leading actors were given the corresponding rank of 'valets de 
chambre' in the royal household. See French Renaissance in England, 
P- 439- 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 377 

ushers, and they were then allotted board wages or 
the pecuniary equivalent in addition to their other 
emoluments. From the date of Shakespeare's admis- 
sion to titular rank in the royal household his plays 
were repeatedly acted in the royal presence, and the 
dramatist grew more intimate than of old with the social 
procedure of the Court. There is a credible tradition 
that King James wrote to Shakespeare ' an amicable let- 
ter ' in his own hand, which was long in the possession of 
Sir William D'Avenant.^ 

In the autumn and winter of 1603 an exceptionally 
virulent outbreak of the plague led to the closing of the 
theatres in London for fully six months. The ^^ ^vii^ou 
Kjng's players were compelled to make a Dec. 2, 
prolonged tour in the provinces, and their ^ °'^' 
normal income seriously decreased. For two months 
from the third week in October, the Court was tem- 
porarily installed at Wilton, the residence of William 
Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, a nobleman whose 
literary tastes were worthy of a nephew of Sir Philip 
Sidney. Late in November Shakespeare's company was 
summoned thither by the royal officers to perform be- 
fore the new King. The actors travelled from Mort- 
lake to Salisbury 'unto the Courte aforesaide,' and their 
performance took place at Wilton House on December 2. 
They received next day 'upon the Councells warrant' 
the large sum of 30/. 'by way of his majesties reward.' ^ 

^ This circumstance was first set forth in print, on the testimony of 
'a credible person then living,' by Bernard Lintot the bookseller, in 
the preface of his edition of Shakespeare's poems in 17 10. Oldys sug- 
gested that the 'credible person' who saw the letter while in D'Avenant's 
possession was John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham (1648-1721), who 
characteristically proved his regard for Shakespeare by adapting to the 
Restoration stage his Julius Casar. 

2 The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the 
Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham's Extracts from the 
Accounts of the Revels at Court, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunning- 
ham's transcript with the original in tlie Public Record Office {Audit 
Office — Declared Accounts — Treasurer of the Chamber, Roll 41, Bundle 
No. 388) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way 
responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the 



378 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

A few weeks later the King gave a further emphatic 
sign of his approbation. The plague failed to abate and 
the Court feared to come nearer the capital 
ton Court', than Hampton Court. There the Christmas 
^6*^"!'^°^^^' holidays were spent, and Shakespeare's company 
were summoned to that palace to provide again 
entertainment for the King and his family. During the 
festive season between St. Stephen's Day, December 26, 
1603, and New Year's Day, January i, 1604, the King's 
players rendered six plays — four before the King and 
two before Prince Henry. The programme included 'a 
play of Robin Goodfellow,' which has been rashly identi- 
fied with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The royal 
reward amounted to the generous sum of 53/.^ In view 
of the fatal persistence of the epidemic Shakespeare's 
company, when the new year opened, were condemned 
to idleness, for the Privy Council maintained its prohi- 
bition of public performances 'in or neare London by 
reason of greate perill that might growe through the 
extraordinarie concourse and assemblie of people.' 
The King proved afresh his benevolent interest in his 
players' welfare by directing the payment, on February 8, 
1603-4, of 30/. to Richard Burbage 'for the mayntenance 
and reliefe of himselfe and the reste of his companie.'^ 

The royal favour flowed indeed in an uninterrupted 
stream. The new King's state procession through the • 
City of London, from the Tower to Whitehall, was orig- 
inally designed as part of the coronation festivities for 
the summer of 1603. But a fear of the coming plague 
confined the celebrations then to the ceremony of the 
crowning in Westminster Abbey on July 25, and the pro- 
Court was formally installed in his house (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 
1603-10, pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players 
to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, 
recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that 
As You Like It was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by con- 
temporary evidence. 

^ See Cunningham's Extracts from the Revels, p. xxxv, and Ernest 
Law's History of Hampton Court Palace, ii. 13. 

2 Cunningham, ibid. 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 379 

cession was postponed till the spring of the following 
year. When the course of the sickness was at length 
stayed, the royal progress through the capital 
was fixed for March 15, 1603-4, and the page- progress 
antry was planned on an elaborate scale, lo'i^^^^ 
Triumphal arches of exceptional artistic charm March is, 
spanned the streets, and the beautiful designs ^ °'^' 
were reproduced in finished copper-plate engravings.'- 
Just before the appointed day Shakespeare and eight other 
members of his acting company each received as a mem- 
ber of the royal household from Sir George Home, master 
of the great wardrobe, four and a half yards of scarlet 
cloth wherewith to make themselves suits of royal red. 
In the document authorising the grant, Shakespeare's 
name stands first on the Hst ; it is immediately followed 
by that of Augustine Phillips, Lawrence Fletcher, John 
Heminges, and Richard Burbage.^ There is small like- 
lihood that Shakespeare and his colleagues joined the 
royal cavalcade in their gay apparel. For the Herald's 
official order of precedence allots the actors no place, 
nor is their presence noticed by Shakespeare's friends, 
Drayton and Ben Jonson, or by the dramatist Dekker, 
all of whom published descriptions of the elaborate 
ceremonial in verse or prose.^ But twenty days after 
the royal passage through London — on April 9, 1604 — 
the King added to his proofs of friendly regard for the 
fortunes of his actors. He caused the Privy Council to 
send an official letter to the Lord Mayor of London and 

1 See The Arches of Triumph . . . invented and published by Stephen 
Harrison, Joyner and Architect and graven by William Kip, London, 1604. 

2 The grant which is in the Lord Chamberlain's books ix. 4 (5) in the 
PubUc Record Ofi&ce was printed in the New Shakspere Society's Trans- 
actio7is 1877-9, Appendix II. The main portion is reproduced in fac- 
simile in Mr. Ernest Law's Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber, 1910, 
p. 8. A blank space in the list separates the first five names (given 
above) from the last four, viz. William Sly, Robert Armin, Henry Con- 
dell, and Richard Cowley. 

3 The King's players on the other hand were allotted a place in the 
funeral procession of James I in 1625, while a like honour was accorded 
the Queen's players in her funeral procession in 1618 (Law's Shake- 
speare as a Groom of the Chamber, 12-13). 



380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the Justices of the Peace for Middlesex and Surrey, bid- 
ding them 'permit and suffer' the King's players to 
'exercise their playes' at their 'usual house,' the Globe.^ 
The plague had disappeared, and the Corporation of Lon- 
don was plainly warned against indulging their veteran 
grudge against Shakespeare's profession. 

Nor in the ceremonial conduct of current diplomatic 
affairs did the Court forgo the personal assistance of the 
The actors actors. Early in August 1604 there reached 
atSomer- London, ou a diplomatic mission of high 

set House, j_- i • . • o • i i. j 

Aug. 9-28, national interest, a Spanish ambassador- 
1604. extraordinary, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, 

Duke de Frias, Constable of Castile, and Great Cham- 
berlain to King Philip III of Spain. His companions 
were two other Spanish statesmen and three representa- 
tives of Archduke Albert of Austria, the governor of the 
Spanish province of the Netherlands. The purpose of 
the mission was to ratify a treaty of peace between Spain 
and England.^ Through nearly the whole of Queen 
Elizabeth's reign — from the days of Shakespeare's 
youth — the two countries had engaged in a furious 
duel by sea and land in both the hemispheres. The 
defeat of the Armada in 1588 was for England a glorious 
incident in the struggle, but it brought no early settle- 
ment in its train. Sixteen years passed without termi- 
nating the quarrel, and though in the autumn of 1604 

^ A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the 'Queen's 
players acting at the Fortune and the Prince's players at the Curtain 
to be entitled to the same privileges as the King's players at the Globe, 
is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner's Cat. Dulwich MSS. pp. 26-7). 
Collier printed it in his New Facts with fraudulent additions, in which 
the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured. 

2 There is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, a painting by 
Marc Gheeraedts, representing the six foreign envoys in consultation 
over the treaty at Somerset House in August 1604 with the five English 
commissioners, viz., Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset (co-author in 
early life of the first English tragedy of Gorbodtic) ; Charles Howard, 
Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral (patron of the well-known 
company of players) ; Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire (Essex's 
successor as Lord Deputy of Ireland) ; Henry Howard, Earl of North- 
ampton, and Sir Robert Cecil, the King's Secretary (afterwards Lord 
Cranborne and Earl of Salisbury). 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 38 1 

many Englishmen still agitated for a continuance of 
the warfare, James I and his Government were resolutely 
bent on ending the long epoch of international strife. 
The English Court prepared a magnificent reception for 
the distinguished envoys. The ambassador was lodged, 
with his two companions from Spain, at the royal residence 
of Somerset House in the Strand, and there the twelve 
chief members of Shakespeare's company were ordered 
in their capacity of Grooms of the Chamber to attend the 
Spanish guests for the whole eighteen days of their stay. 
The three Flemish envoys were entertained at another 
house in the Strand, at Durham House, and there Queen 
Anne's company of actors, of which Thomas Heywood 
was a member, provided the household service. On 
August 9 Shakespeare and his colleagues went into resi- 
dence at Somerset House 'on his Majesty's service,' 
in order to 'wait and attend' on the Constable of Castile, 
who headed the special embassy, and they remained 
there till August 28. Professional work was not re- 
quired of the players. Cruder sport than the drama 
was alone admitted to the ofhcial programme of amuse- 
ments. The festivities in the Spaniards' honour cul- 
minated in u splendid banquet at Whitehall on Sunday 
August 28 (new style) — the day on which the treaty 
was signed. In the morning the twelve actors with the 
other members of the royal household accompanied the 
Constable in formal procession from Somerset House to 
James I's palace. At the banquet, Shakespeare's patron, 
the Earl of Southampton, and the Earl of Pembroke 
acted as stewards. There followed a ball, and the 
eventful day was brought to a close with exhibitions of 
bear-baiting, bull-baiting, rope-dancing, and feats of 
horsemanship.^ Subsequently Sir John Stanhope (after- 

^ Cf. Stow's Chronicle 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, 
Relacion de la Jornada del exc^"^ Condestahile de Castilla, etc., Antwerp, 
1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis's Original Letters, 2nd series, 
vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye's 
England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 11 7-1 24. In the unprinted accounts 
of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels for the year October 1603 to 



382 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

wards Lord Stanhope of Harrington), who was Treasurer 
of the chamber, received order of the Lord Chamber- 
lain to pay Shakespeare and his friends for their services 
the sum of 21Z. 12^.^ The Spanish Constable also 
bestowed a liberal personal gift on every English official 
who attended on him during his eighteen days' sojourn 
in London. 

At normal times throughout his reign James I relied 
to an ever-increasing extent on the activity of Shake- 
speare's company for the entertainment of the 
'Love's Court, and royal appreciation of Shakespeare's 
Labour's dramatic work is well attested year by year. 
In the course of 1604 Queen Anne expressed a 
wish to witness a play under a private roof, and the 
Earl of Southampton's mansion in the Strand was 
chosen for the purpose. A prominent officer of the Court, 
Sir Walter Cope, in whose hands the arrangements 

October 1604, charge is made for his three days' attendance with four 
men to direct the non-dramatic entertainments 'at the receaving of 
the Constable of Spayne' (Public Record Office, Declared Accounts, 
Pipe Office Roll 2805). 

^ The formal record of the service of the King's players and of their 
payments is in the Public Record Office among the Audit Office Declared 
Accounts of the Treasurer of the Kynges Majesties Chamber Roll 41, 
Bundle No. 388. The same information is repeated in the Pipe Office 
Parchment Bundle, No. 543. The warrant for payment was granted 
' to Augustine Phillipps and John Hemynges for the allowance of them- 
selves and tenne of their fellowes.' Shakespeare, the very close associate 
of Phillips and Heminges, was one of the 'tenne.' The remaining nine 
certainly included Burbage, Lawrence Fletcher, Condell, Sly, Armin, 
and Cowley. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his Outlines (i. 213), vaguely noted 
the effect of the record without giving any reference. Mr. Ernest Law 
has given a facsimile of the pay warrant in his Shakespeare as a Groom of 
the Chamber, 1910, pp. 19 seq. The popular comedian Thomas Greene, 
and ten other members of the Queen's company (including Heywood) 
who were in 'waiting as Grooms of the Chamber' on the Spanish envoy's 
companions — the three diplomatists from the Low Countries — at 
Durham House, for the eighteen days of their sojourn there received a 
fee of igl. 16^. — a rather smaller sum than Shakespeare's company 
(Mary Sullivan, Court Masques of James I, 1913, p. 141). The Flemish 
embassy was headed by the Count d'Aremberg, and one of his two com- 
panions was Louis Verreiken, whom, on a previous visit to London, in 
March 1 599-1 600, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, had enter- 
tained at Hunsdon House when Shakespeare's company performed a 
play there for his amusement (see p. 65 n. 2 and 244 n. supra). 



THE ACCESSION OF KING JAMES I 383 

were left, sent for Burbage, Shakespeare's friend and 
colleague. Burbage informed Sir Walter that there 
was ' no new play that the Queen had not seen ' ; but his 
company had 'just revived an old one called "Love's 
Labour's Lost," which for wit and mirth' (he said) 
would 'please her Majesty exceedingly.' Cope readily 
accepted the suggestion, and the earliest of Shakespeare's 
comedies which had won Queen Elizabeth's special 
approbation was submitted to the new Queen's judg- 
ment.^ 

At holiday seasons Shakespeare and his friends were 
invariably visitors at the royal palaces. Between All 
Saints' Day (November i), 1604, and the ensu- shake- 
ing Shrove Tuesday (February 12, 1604-5), they speare's 
gave no less than eleven performances at White- court^ 
hall.^ As many as seven of the chosen plays ^604-5. 
during this season were from Shakespeare's pen. 
'Othello,' the 'Merry Wives of Windsor,' 'Measure for 
Measure,' 'The Comedy of Errors,' 'Love's Labour's 
Lost,' 'Henry V,' were each rendered once, while of 'The 
Merchant of Venice' two performances were given, the 
second being specially ' com[m]aunded by the Kings 
M[ajes]tie.^ The King clearly took a personal pride in 
the repute of the company which bore his name, and he 
lost no opportunity of making their proficiency known 



^ Cope gave the actor a written message to that effect for him to 
carry to Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Cranborne, the King's secretary. Cope 
inquired in his letter whether Lord Cranborne would prefer that his 
own house should take the place of Lord Southampton's for the purpose 
of the performance (Calendar of MSS. of the Marquis of Salisbury, 
in Hist. MSS. Comm. Third Rep. p. 148). 

2 At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original 
accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber 
for various (detached) years in the early part of James I's reign. These 
documents show that Shakespeare's company acted at Court on Novem- 
ber I and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 
2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Mon- 
day, and Shrove Tuesday, 1604-5. 

^ Cf. Ernest Law's Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 191 1, pp. 
xvi seq. with facsimile extract from The Revells Booke An" 1605 in the 
Public Record Ofi&ce. 



384 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

to distinguished foreign visitors. When the Queen's 
brother, Frederick, King of Denmark, was her husband's 
guest in the summer of 1606, the King's players were 
specially summoned to perform three plays before the 
two monarchs — two at Greenwich and one at Hampton 
Court. The celebration of the marriage of the King's 
daughter Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine 
in February 16 13 was enlivened by an exceptionally 
lavish dramatic entertainment which was again fur- 
nished by the actors of the Blackfriars and Globe 
theatres. During the first twelve years (i 603-1 614) 
of King James's reign, Shakespeare's company, accord- 
ing to extant records of royal expenses, received fees for 
no less than 150 performances at Court. ^ 

1 Cunningham, Revels, p. xxxiv; Murray, English Dramatic Com- 
panies, i. 173 seq. 



XVIII 

THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 

Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shake- 
speare's activity redoubled, but his work shows none of 
the conventional marks of literature that is ,^ , ,, , 
produced in the blaze of Court favour. The and 'Mea- 
first six years of the new reign saw him absorbed ^^\l°l , 
in the highest themes of tragedy; and an un- 
paralleled intensity and energy, which had small affinity 
with the atmosphere of a Court, thenceforth illumined 
almost every scene that he contrived. 

To 1604, when Shakespeare's fortieth year was clos- 
ing, the composition of two plays of immense grasp can be 
confidently assigned. One of these — ' Othello ' — ranks 
with Shakespeare's greatest achievements ; while the 
other — ■ ' Measure for Measure ' — although as a whole 
far inferior to 'Othello' or to any other example of 
Shakespeare's supreme power — contains one of the 
finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, 11. ii. 43 seq.) 
and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of 
death, iii. i. 116-30) in the range of Shakespearean 
drama. 

'Othello' was doubtless the first new piece by Shake- 
speare that was acted before James. It was produced on 
November i, 1604, in the old Banqueting House jjj^ q^^^^ 
at Whitehall, which had been often put by perform- 
Queen Elizabeth to Hke uses, although the build- '^^'^^^' 
ing was now deemed to be ' old, rotten, and sHght builded ' 
and in 1607 a far more ornate structure took its place.^ 

^ Cf. Stow's Annals, ed. Howes, p. 891, col. i. James I's banqueting 
house at Whitehall was destroyed by fire after a dozen years' usage on 
2C 385 



386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

'Measure for Measure' followed 'Othello' at Whitehall 
on December 26, 1604, and that piece was enacted in a 
different room of the palace, 'the great hall.' ^ Neither 
piece was printed in Shakespeare's lifetime. 'Measure 
for Measure' figured for the first time in the First Foho 
of 1623. 'Othello,' which held the stage continuously,^ 

January 12, 16 18-9, and was then rebuilt from the designs of Inigo Jones. 
The new edifice was completed on March 31, 1622. Inigo Jones's ban- 
queting house, now part of the United Service Institution in Parliament 
Street, is all that survives of Whitehall Palace. 

^ These dates and details are drawn from 'The Reuells Booke, Ano 
1605,' a slender manuscript pamphlet among the Audit Office archives 
formerly at Somerset House, and now in the Public Record Office. 
The 'booke' covers the year November 1604-October 1605. It was 
first printed in 1842 by Peter Cunningham, a well-known Shakespearean 
student and a clerk in the Audit Oflice, in his Extracts from the Accounts 
of the Revels at Court (Shakespeare Soc. 1842, pp. 203 seq.). When 
Cunningham left the Audit Office in 1858 he retained in his possession 
this 'Reuells Booke' of 1605 as well as one for 161 1-2 and some Audit 
Ofi&ce accounts of 1636-7. These documents were missing when the 
Audit Ofiice papers were transferred from Somerset House to the Public 
Record Office in 1859, but they were recovered from Cunningham by 
the latter institution in 1868. It was then hastily suspected that both 
the 'Booke' of 1605 and that of 1611-2 which also contained Shake- 
spearean information, had been tampered with, and that the Shake- 
spearean references were modern forgeries. The authenticity of the 
Shakespearean entries of 1604-5 was, however, confirmed by manuscript 
notes to identical effect which had been made by Malone from the Audit 
Ofiice archives at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and are pre- 
served in the Bodleian Library among the Malone papers (MS. Malone 
29). A very thorough investigation carried out by Mr. Ernest Law 
has recently cleared the 'Reuells Booke Ano 1605' as well as that of 
161 1-2, and the papers of 1636-7 of all suspicion. See Ernest Law's 
Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries, 191 1, and More about Shakespeare 
^Forgeries' 1913; see Appendix I, p. 650 infra. Collier's assertion in 
his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas 
Egerton's residence at Harefield, near Uxbridge, on August 6, 1602, was 
based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere's MSS. at 
Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by 
the clerk. Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton's household 
expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his Egerton Papers 
(Camden Soc), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 
i860 to be 'a shameful forgery' (cf. Ingleby's Complete View of the Shak- 
spere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5), and there is no possibility of this 
verdict being reversed. 

2 The piece was witnessed at the Globe theatre on April 30, 1610, 
by a German visitor to London, Prince Lewis Frederick of Wiirtemberg 
(Rye's England as seen by Foreigners, pp. cxviii-ix, 61), and it was re- 
peated at Court early in 1613 (Sh. Soc. Papers, ii. 124). 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 387 

first appeared in a belated Quarto in 1622, six years after 
Shakespeare's death. The pubHsher, Thomas Walkley, 
had obtained a theatre copy which had been ^^^nca,. 
abbreviated and was none too carefully tran- tion of 
scribed. He secured a license from the Sta- ^ ^ °' 
tioners' Company on October 6, 1621, and next year the 
volume issued from the competent press of Nicholas 
Okes, ' as it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, 
and at the Black Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants.' In 
an ' address to the reader ' Walkley claimed sole responsi- 
biHty (' the author being dead ') for the undertaking. He 
forbore to praise the play; 'for that ^hich is good I 
hope every man will commend without entreaty ; and I 
am the bolder because the author's name is sufficient to 
vent his work.' The editors of the First Folio ignored 
Walkley's venture and presented an independent and a 
better text. 

The plots of both 'Othello' and 'Measure for Measure' 
come from the same Italian source — from a collection 
of Italian novels known as 'Hecatommithi,' cintWo's 
which was penned by Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, novels, 
a sixteenth-century disciple of Boccaccio. Cinthio's 
volume was first pubHshed in 1565. But while Shake- 
speare based each of the two plays on Cinthio's romantic 
work, he remoulded the course of each story at its 
critical point. The spirit of melodrama was exorcised. 
Varied phases of passion were interpreted with magical 
subtlety, and the language was charged with a poetic 
intensity, which seldom countenanced mere rhetoric or 
declamation. 

Cinthio's painful story of 'Un Capitano Moro,' or 'The 
Moor of Venice' (decad. iii. Nov. vii.), is not known to 
have been translated into English before Shake- Shake- 
speare dramatised it in the play on which he ^P^^f^^f^^ 
bestowed the title of 'Othello.' He frankly tafeof'^'^ 
accepted the main episodes and characters of otheUo. 
the Itahan romance. At the same time he gave all the 
personages excepting Desdemona names of his own 



388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

devising, and he invested every one of them with a new 
and graphic significance.^ Roderigo, the fooHsh dupe of 
lago, is Shakespeare's own creation, and he adds some 
minor characters, Hke Desdemona's father and uncle. 
The only character in the Italian novel with whom 
Shakespeare dispensed is lago's little child. The hero 
and heroine (Othello and Desdemona) are by no means 
featureless in the Italian novel ; but the passion, pathos, 
and poetry with which Shakespeare endows their speech 
are all his own. lago, who lacks in Cinthio's pages any 
trait to distinguish him from the conventional criminal 
of ItaHan fiction, became in Shakespeare's hands the 
subtlest of all studies of intellectual villainy and hy- 
pocrisy. The lieutenant Cassio and lago's wife Emilia 
are in the Italian tale lay figures. But Shakespeare's 
genius declared itself most signally in his masterly recon- 
struction of the catastrophe. He lent Desdemona's 
tragic fate a wholly new and fearful intensity by making 
lago's cruel treachery known to Othello at the last — just 
after lago's perfidy had impelled the noble-hearted Moor, 
in groundless jealousy, to murder his gentle and innocent 
wife.^ 

The whole tragedy displays to magnificent advantage 
the dramatist's mature powers. An unfaltering equilib- 

^ In Ginthio's story none of the characters, save Desdemona, have 
proper names; they are known only by their office; thus Othello is 
'il capitano moro' or 'il moro.' lago is '1' alfiero' {i.e. the ensign or 
'ancient') and Cassio is 'il capo di squadrone.' 

2 In Cinthio's melodramatic denoument 'the ensign' (lago) and 'the 
Moor' (Othello) plot together the deaths of 'the captain' (Cassio) and 
Desdemona. Cassio escapes unhurt, but lago in Othello's sight kills 
Desdemona with three strokes of a stocking filled with sand ; whereupon 
Othello helps the murderer to throw down the ceiling of the room on his 
wife's dead body so that the death might appear to be accidental. Though 
ignorant of Desdemona's innocence, Othello soon quarrels with lago, 
who in revenge contrives the recall of the Moor to Venice, there to stand 
his trial for Desdemona's murder. The Moor, after being tortured with- 
out avail, is released and is ultimately slain by Desdemona's kinsfolk 
without being disillusioned. lago is charged with some independent 
offence and dies under torture. Cinthio represents that the story was 
true, and that he owes his knowledge of it to lago's widow, Shakespeare's 
Emilia. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 389 

rium is maintained in the treatment of plot and char- 
acters alike. The first act passes in Venice ; the rest 
of the play has its scene in Cyprus. Dr. John- . . 
son, a champion of the classical drama, argued unity of 
that had Shakespeare confined the action of ^^^ , 
the play to Cyprus alone he would have satis- 
fied all the canons of classical unity. It might well 
be argued that, despite the single change of scene, Shake- 
speare reahses in 'Othello' the dramatic ideal of unity 
more effectively than a rigic adherence to the letter of 
the classical law would allow. The absence of genuine 
comic reHef emphasises the classical affinity, and differ- 
entiates 'Othello' from its chief forerunner 'Hamlet.' ^ 
France seems to have first adapted to literary pur- 
poses the central theme of ' Measure for Measure ' ; early 
in the sixteenth century French drama and 
fiction both portrayed the agonies of a virtuous of 'Mea- 
wbman, who, when her near kinsman lies under ^^ ^'^^ , 
lawful sentence of death, is promised his par- 
don by the governor of the State at the price of her 
chastity.^ The repulsive tale impressed the imagination 
of all Europe; but in Shakespeare's Hfetime it chiefly 
circulated in the form which it took at the hand of the 
Italian novelist Cinthio in the later half of the century. 
Cinthio made the perilous story the subject not cinthio's 
only of a romance but of a tragedy called ' Epi- ^^^i^- 
tia,' and his romance found entry into English literature, 
before Shakespeare wrote his play. Direct recourse to 
the Italian text was not obligatory as in the case of 
Cinthio's story of ' Othello.' Cinthio's novel of ' Measure 
for Measure' had been twice rendered into English by 
George Whetstone, an industrious author, who was the 
friend of the Elizabethan literary pioneer, George 
Gascoigne. Whetstone not only gave a somewhat 

^ lago's cjmical and shameless mirth does not belong to the category 
of comic relief, and the clown in Othello's service, whose wit is unim- 
pressive, plays a small and negligible part. 

^ Cf. Boas, University Drama, p. 19; Lee, French Renaissance in 
England, p. 408. 



390 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy 
play of 'Promos and Cassandra' (in two parts of five 
acts each, 1578), but he also freely translated it in his 
collection of prose tales, called 'Heptameron of Ciuill 
Discourses' (1582). 'Measure for Measure' owes its 
episodes to Whetstone's work, although Shakespeare 
borrows little of his language. Whetstone changes 
Cinthio's nomenclature, and Shakespeare again gives all 
the personages new appellations. Cinthio's Juriste and 
Epitia, who are respectively rechristened by Whetstone 
Promos and Cassandra, become in Shakespeare's pages 
Angelo and Isabella.^ There is a bare likelihood that 
Shakespeare also knew Cinthio's Italian play, which was 
untranslated ; there, as in the Italian novel, the leading 
character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was 
known as Juriste, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his 
novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which 
may have suggested Shakespeare's designation.^ 

In the hands of Shakespeare's predecessors the popular 
tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty. But Shake- 
Shake- speare prudently showed scant respect for their 
speare's handling of the narrative. By diverting the 
vana ions. (,Q^j.gg ^f ^]^g pj^^ ^^ ^ Critical poiut he not 

merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic 
dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent 
theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as 
the price of her brother's Hfe. The central fact of Shake- 
speare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional 
chastity. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the 
Duke's abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily 
conceived. But his creation of the pathetic character of 

^ Whetstone states, however, that his 'rare historic of Promos and 
Cassandra' was 'reported' to him by 'Madam Isabella,' who is not 
otherwise identified. 

^ Richard Garnett's Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227. Angelo, how- 
ever, is a name which figures not infrequently in lists of dramatis personcs 
of other English plays in the opening years of the seventeenth century. 
Subordinate characters are so christened in Ben Jonson's The Case is 
Altered, and in Chapman's May Day, both of which were written before 
1602, though they were first printed in 1609 and 161 1 respectively. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 39 1 

Mariana ' of the moated grange ' — the legally affianced 
bride of Angelo, Isabella's would-be seducer — skilfully 
excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the old 
stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of mar- 
riage. Shakespeare's argument is throughout philosophi- 
cally subtle. The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and 
the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chastity, and the 
many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked 
sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely 
comic interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to 
efface natural instincts by the coercion of law. There is 
little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to 
the Court before which it was performed. But the two 
emphatic references to a ruler's dislike of mobs, despite 
his love of his people, were perhaps penned in defer- 
ential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was 
notorious. In act i. sc. i. 67-72 the Duke remarks : 

I love the people, 
But do not like to stage me to their eyes. 
Though it do well, I do not relish well 
Their loud applause and aves vehement. 
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion 
That does affect it. 

Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act 11. 
sc. iv. 27-30) : 

The general [i.e. the public], subject to a well-wish'd king, . . . 
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love 
Must needs appear offence.^ 

In 'Macbeth,' the 'great epic drama,' which he began 
in 1605 and completed next year, Shakespeare employed 

1 When James I made his great progress from Edinburgh to London 
on his accession to the English throne, the loyal author of 'The true 
narration of the entertainment of his Royal Majesty' (1603) on the long 
journey, noted that 'though the King greatly tendered' his people's 
'love,' yet he deemed their 'multitudes' oppressive, and published 'an 
inhibition against the inordinate and daily access of people's coming' 
(cf. Nichols's Progresses of King James I, i. 76). At a later date King 
James was credited with 'a hasty and passionate custom which often 
in his sudden distemper would bid a pox or plague on such as flocked 
to see him' (Life of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, i. 170). 



392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

a setting wholly in harmony with the accession of a 

Scottish king. The story was drawn from Holinshed's 

, , ' Chronicle of Scottish History,' with occasional 

Macbeth. j- , . ^• c^ ^^- ^ 

reference, perhaps, to earlier Scottish sources. 
But the chronicler's bald record supplies Shakespeare 
with the merest scaffolding. Duncan appears in the 
rpj^g ' Chronicle ' as an incapable ruler whose removal 

legend in commends itself to his subjects, while Macbeth, 
° ^^^ ^ ■ in spite of the crime to which he owes his throne, 
proves a satisfactory sovereign through the greater part 
of his seventeen years' reign. Only towards the close 
does his tyranny provoke the popular rebellion which 
proves fatal to him. Holinshed's notice of Duncan's 
murder by Macbeth is bare of detail. Shakespeare in his 
treatment of that episode adapted Holinshed's more 
precise account of another royal murder — that of King 
Duff, an earlier Scottish King who was slain by the chief 
Donwald, while he was on a visit to the chief's castle. 
The vaguest hint was offered by the chronicler of Lady 
Macbeth's influence over her husband. In subsidiary 
incident Shakespeare borrowed a few passages almost 
verbatim from Holinshed's text ; but every scene which 
has supreme dramatic value is Shakespeare's own inven- 
tion. Although the chronicler briefly notices Macbeth's 
meeting with the witches, Shakespeare was under no debt 
to any predecessor for the dagger scene, for the thrilHng 
colloquies of husband and wife concerning Duncan's 
murder, for Banquo's apparition at the feast or for 
Lady Macbeth's walking in her sleep. 

The play gives a plainer indication than any other of 
Shakespeare's works of the dramatist's desire to concili- 
The appeal ate the Scottish King's idiosyncrasies. The 
to James I. supernatural machinery of the three witches 
which Holinshed suggested accorded with the King's 
superstitious faith in demonology. The dramatist was 
lavish in sympathy with Banquo, James's reputed 
ancestor and founder of the Stuart dynasty; while 
Macbeth's vision of kings who carry 'twofold balls and 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 393 

treble sceptres' (iv. i. 20) loyally referred to the union 
of Scotland with England and Ireland under James's 
sway. The two 'balls' or globes were royal insignia 
which King James bore in right of his double kingship of 
England and Scotland, and the three sceptres were those 
of his three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ire- 
land. No monarch before James I held these emblems 
conjointly. The irrelevant description in the play of 
the English King's practice of touching for the King's 
evil (iv. iii. 149 seq.) was doubtless designed as a further 
personal compliment to King James, whose confidence 
in the superstition was profound. The allusion by the 
porter (11. iii. 9) to the 'equivocator . . . who committed 
treason' was perhaps suggested by the insolent defence 
of the doctrine of equivocation made by the Jesuit Henry 
Garnett, who was executed early in 1606 for his share in 
the 'Gunpowder Plot.' 

The piece, which was not printed until 1623, is in its 
existing shape by far the shortest of all Shakespeare's 
tragedies ('Hamlet' is nearly twice as long), Thescenk 
and it is possible that it survives only in eiabora- • 
an abbreviated acting version. Much scenic ^'°'^' 
elaboration characterised the production. Dr. Simon 
Forman, a playgoing astrologer, witnessed a performance 
of the tragedy at the Globe on April 20, 1610, and noted 
that Macbeth and Banquo entered the stage on horse- 
back, and that Banquo's ghost was materially represented 
(ill. iv. 40 seq.).^ 

'Macbeth' ranks with 'Othello' among the noblest 
tragedies either of the modern or the ancient world. Yet 

^ In his Booke of Plaies (among Ashmole's MSS. at the Bodleian) 
Forman's note on Macbeth begins thus : ' In Mackbeth at the Globe 16 10, 
the 20 of Aprill Saturday, there was to be observed, firste howe Mackbeth 
and Banko, two noble men of Scotland, ridinge thorow a wod, ther stode 
before them three women feiries or nimphs . . .' Of the feasting scene 
Forman wrote: 'The ghoste of Banco came and sate down in his [i.e. 
Macbeth's] cheier be-hind him. And he turninge about to sit down again 
sawe the goste of Banco which fronted him so.' (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 
86.) See for Forman's other theatrical experiences p. 126 supra and 
p. 420 itifra. 



394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the bounds of sensational melodrama are approached 
by it more nearly than by any other of Shakespeare's 
The chief plays. The melodramatic effect is heightened 
characters, j-^y ^-j^g physical darkness which envelopes the 
main episodes. It is the poetic fertility of the language, 
the magical simplicity of speech in the critical turns of 
the action, the dramatic irony accentuating the myste- 
rious issues, the fascinating complexity of the two leading 
characters which lift the piece into the first rank. The 
characters of hero and heroine — Macbeth and his wife 
— are depicted with the utmost subtlety and insight. 
Their worldly ambition involves them in hateful crime. 
Yet Macbeth is a brave soldier who is endowed with 
poetic imagination and values a good name. Though 
Lady Macbeth lacks the moral sense, she has no small 
share of womanly tact, of womanly affections, and above 
all of womanly nerves. 

In three points 'Macbeth' differs somewhat from other 
of Shakespeare's productions in the great class of Hter- 
Excep- ature to which it belongs. The interweaving 
tionai with the tragic story of supernatural interludes 

eatures. -^^ which Fate is weirdly personified is not exactly 
matched in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. In 
the second place, the action proceeds with a rapidity 
that is wholly without parallel in the rest of Shake- 
speare's plays; the critical scenes are unusually short; 
the great sleepwalking scene is only seventy lines long, 
of which scarcely twenty, the acme of dramatic brevity, 
are put in Lady Macbeth's mouth. The swift move- 
ment only slackens when Shakespeare is content to take 
his cue from HoHnshed, as in the somewhat tedious epi- 
sode of Macduff's negotiation in England with Malcolm, 
Duncan's son and heir (act iv. sc. iii.). Nowhere, in 
the third place, has Shakespeare introduced comic relief 
into a tragedy with bolder effect than in the porter's 
speech after the murder of Duncan (ii. iii. i seq.). The 
theory that this passage was from another hand does 
not merit acceptance. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 395 

Yet elsewhere there are signs that the play as it 
stands incorporates occasional passages by a second pen. 
Duncan's interview with the ' bleeding sergeant ' signs of 
(act I. sc. ii.) falls so far below the style of the o^her pens, 
rest of the play as to suggest an interpolation by a hack 
of the theatre. So, too, it is difficult to credit Shake- 
speare with the superfluous interposition (act 11. sc. v.) 
of Hecate, a classical goddess of the infernal world, who 
appears unheralded to complain that the witches lay 
their spells on Macbeth without asking her leave. The 
resemblances between Thomas Middleton's later play of 
'The Witch' (16 10) and portions of 'Macbeth' may 
safely be ascribed to plagiarism on Middleton's part. 
Of two songs which, according to the stage directions, 
were to be sung during the representation of 'Macbeth,' 
'Come away, come away' (iii. v.) and 'Black spirits 
&c.' (iv. i.), only the first words are noted there, but 
songs beginning with the same words are set out in full 
in Middleton's play ; they were probably by Middleton, 
and were interpolated by actors in a stage version of 
'Macbeth' after its original production. 

'King Lear,' in which Shakespeare's tragic genius 
moved without any faltering on Titanic heights, was 
written during 1606, and was produced before 'King 
the Court at Whitehall on the night of Decem- ^ear.' 
ber 26 of that year.^ Eleven months later, on November 
26, 1607, two undistinguished stationers, John Busby 
and Nathaniel Butter, obtained a Hcense for the publi- 
cation of the great tragedy ' under the hands of ' Sir 
George Buc, the Master of the Revels, and of the wardens 
of the company.^ Nathaniel Butter published a quarto 

^ This fact is stated in the Stationers' Company's license of Nov. 26, 
1607, and is repeated a little confusedly on the title-page of the Quarto 
of 1608. 

2 John Busby, whose connection with the transaction does not ex- 
tend beyond the mention of his name in the entry in the Stationers' 
Register, was five years before as elusively and as mysteriously associated 
with the first edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor^ (1602). _ Butter, 
who was alone the effective promoter of the publication of King Lear, 
became a freeman of the Stationers' Company early in 1604, and he 



396 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

edition in the following year (1608). The verbose title, 
which is from the pen of a bookseller's hack, ran 
The Quarto thus : 'M. William Shak-speare : his true 
of 1 608. chronicle historic of the life and death of King 
Lear and his three daughters. With the unfortunate life 
of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and 
his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam. As it 
was played before the King's Maiestie at Whitehall 
upon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his 
Maiesties seruants playing usually at the Gloabe on the 
Banke-side.' In the imprint the publisher mentions 
'his shop in Pauls Churchyard at the signe of the Pide 
Bull near St. Austin's Gate.' The printer of the volume, 
who is unnamed, was probably Nicholas Okes, a young 
friend of Richard Field, who had stood surety for him in 
1603 when he was made free of the Stationers' Company, 
and who fourteen years later printed the first quarto of 
'Othello.' Butter's edition of 'King Lear' followed a 
badly transcribed playhouse copy, and it abounds in 
gross typographical errors.^ Another edition, also bear- 
ing the date 1608, is a later reprint of a copy of Butter's 
original issue and repeats its typographical confusions.^ 

lived on to 1664, acquiring some fame in Charles I's reign as a purveyor 
of news-sheets or rudimentary journals. His experience of the trade 
was very limited before he obtained the license to publish Shakespeare's 
King Lear in 1607. 

^ There was no systematic correction of the press ; but after some 
sheets were printed off, the type was haphazardly corrected here and 
there, and further sheets were printed off. The uncorrected sheets 
were not destroyed and the corrected and uncorrected sheets were care- 
lessly bound together in proportions which vary in extant copies. In 
the result, accessible examples of the edition present rnany typographical 
discrepancies one from another. 

2 The Second Quarto has a title-page which differs from that of the 
first in spelling the dramatist's surname ' Shakespeare ' instead of ' Shak- 
speare' and in giving the imprint the curt form 'Printed for Nathaniel 
Butter, 1608.' There seems reason to believe that the dated imprint 
of the second quarto is a falsification, and that the volume was actually 
published by Thomas Pavier at the press of William Jaggard as late as 
1 6 19 (see Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909). The Second 
Quarto is, like the First, unmethodically made up of corrected and un- 
corrected sheets, but in all known copies of the Second Quarto two of 
the sheets (E and K) always appear in their corrected shape. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 397 

The First Folio furnished a greatly improved text. 
Fewer verbal errors appear there, and some no lines are 
new. At the same time the Foho omits 300 lines of the 
Quarto text, including the whole of act iv. sc. iii. (with 
the beautiful description of Cordelia's reception of the 
news of her sisters' maltreatment of their father), and 
some other passages which are as unquestionably Shake- 
spearean. The editor of the Folio clearly had access to a 
manuscript which was quite independent of that of the 
Quarto, but had undergone abbreviation at different 
points. The Folio 'copy,' as far as it went, was more 
carefully transcribed than the Quarto 'copy.' Yet 
neither the Quarto nor the Folio version of ' Eling Lear ' 
reproduced the author's autograph; each was derived 
from its own playhouse transcript. 

As in the case of its immediate predecessor ' Macbeth,' 
Shakespeare's tragedy of 'King Lear' was based on a 
story with which Holinshed's ' Chronicle ' had 
long familiarised Elizabethans ; and other and the 
writers who had anticipated Shakespeare in !^°'"y °^ 
adapting Holinshed's tale to literary purposes 
gave the dramatist help. The theme is part of the 
legendary lore of pre-Roman Britain which the Eliza- 
bethan chronicler and his readers accepted without 
question as authentic history. Holinshed had followed 
the guidance of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in the 
twelfth century first undertook a history of British Kings. 
Geoffrey recorded the exploits of a Celtic dynasty which 
traced its origin to a Trojan refugee Brute or Brutus, 
who was reputed to be the grandson of Aeneas of Troy. 
Elizabethan poets and dramatists alike welcomed material 
from Geoffrey's fables of Brute and his line in Holin- 
shed's version. Brute's son Locrine was the Brito- 
Trojan hero of the pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy of 
the name, which had appeared in print in 1595. 'King 
Lear' was one of many later occupants of Locrine's 
throne, who figured on the Elizabethan stage. 

Nor was Shakespeare the first playwright to give 



39^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

theatrical vogue to King Lear's mythical fortunes. On 
April 6, 1594, a piece called 'Kinge Leare' was acted 
The old at the Rose theatre 'by the Queene's men 
pi^y- and my lord of Susexe together.' On May 14, 

1594, a license was granted for the printing of this piece 
under the title : ' The moste famous chronicle historye 
of Leire Kinge of England and his three daughters.' 
But the permission did not take effect, and some eleven 
years passed before the actual publication in 1605 of the 
pre-Shakespearean play. The piece was then entitled : 
'The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his three 
daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordelia, as it hath bene 
divers and sundry times lately acted.' The author, 
whose name is unknown, based his work on Holinshed's 
'Chronicle,' but he sought occasional help in the three 
derivative poetic narratives of King Lear's fabulous 
career, which figure respectively in William Warner's 
'Albion's England' (1586, bk. iii. ch. 14), in 'The Mirror 
for Magistrates' (1587), and in Edmund Spenser's 
'Faerie Queene' (1590, bk. ii. canto x. stanzas 27-32). 
At the same time the old dramatist embellished his 
borrowed cues by devices of his own invention. He gave 
his ill-starred monarch a companion who proved a pattern 
of fideHty and became one of the pillars of the dramatic 
action. The King of France's hasty courtship of King 
Lear's banished daughter Cordelia follows original lines. 
Lear's sufferings in a thunderstorm during his wander- 
ings owe nothing to earlier literature. But the resto- 
ration of Lear to his throne at the close of the old piece 
agrees with all earlier versions of the fable.^ 

Shakespeare drew many hints from the old play as well 
as from a direct study of Holinshed. But he refashioned 
Shake- ^^^ Strengthened the great issues of the plot 
speare's in- by methods which lay outside the capacity of 
novations, gj^j^gj- qJ^j dramatist or chronicler. There is 
no trace of Lear's Fool in any previous version. Shake- 

^ Cf. The Chronicle History of King Leir: the original of Shakespeare^ s 
King Lear, ed. by Sidney Lee, 1909. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 399 

speare too sought an entirely new complication for the 
story by grafting on it the complementary by-plot of the 
Earl of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, 
which he drew from an untried source, Sir Philip Sidney's 
'Arcadia.' ^ Hints for the speeches of Edgar when 
feigning madness were found in Harsnet's 'Declaration of 
Popish Impostures,' 1603. Above all, Shakespeare ig- 
nored the catastrophe of the chronicles which contented 
the earlier dramatist and preceding poets. They re- 
stored Lear to his forsaken throne at the triumphant 
hands of Cordelia and her husband the French King. 
Shakespeare invented the defeat and death of King Lear 
and of his daughter Cordelia. Thus Shakespeare first 
converted the story into inexorable tragedy. 

In every act of 'Lear' the pity and terror of which 
tragedy is capable reach their climax. Only one who 
has something of the Shakespearean gift of The great- 
language could adequately characterise the nessof 
scenes of agony — ' the living martyrdom ' — to ^^^ ^^^' 
which the fiendish ingratitude of his daughters condemns 
in Shakespeare's play the abdicated king — ' a very fool- 
ish, fond old man, fourscore and upward.' The elemen- 
tal passions burst forth in his utterances with all the 
vehemence of the volcanic tempest which beats about 
his defenceless head in the scene on the heath. The 
brutal blinding of the Earl of Gloucester by the Duke 
of Cornwall exceeds in horror any other situation that 
Shakespeare created, if we assume that he was not 
responsible for similar scenes of mutilation in 'Titus 
Andronicus.' At no point in 'Lear' is there any loosen- 
ing of the tragic tension. The faithful half-witted lad 
who serves the king as his fool plays the jesting chorus 
on his master's fortunes in penetrating earnest and 
deepens the desolating pathos. The metre of 'King 

1 Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled 'The pitiful state and 
story of the Paphlagonian unkind king and his kind son ; first related 
by the son, then by the blind father' (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590, 4to. 
pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.). 



400 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Lear' is less regular than in any earlier play, and the 
language is more elliptical and allusive. The verbal 
and metrical temper gives the first signs of that valiant 
defiance of all conventional restraint which marks the 
latest stage in the development of Shakespeare's style, 
and becomes habitual to his latest efforts. 

Although Shakespeare's powers were unexhausted, he 
rested for a while on his laurels after his colossal effort of 
'Timonof 'Lear' (1607). He reverted in the following 
Athens.' ygg^j- ^q earlier habits of collaboration. In two 
succeeding dramas, 'Timon of Athens' and 'Pericles,' 
he would seem indeed to have done little more than 
lend his hand to brilliant embellishments of the dull 
incoherence of very pedestrian pens. Lack of construc- 
tive plan deprives the two pieces of substantial dramatic 
value. Only occasional episodes which Shakespeare's 
genius illumined lift them above the rank of mediocrity. 

An extant play on the subject of 'Timon of Athens' 
was composed in 1600 ^ but there is nothing to show that 
Timon and Shakespeare or his coadjutor, who remains 
Plutarch, auonymous, was acquainted with it. Timon 
was a familiar figure in classical legend and was a pro- 
verbial type of censorious misanthropy. ' Critic Timon ' 
is lightly mentioned by Shakespeare in ' Love's Labour's 
Lost.' His story was originally told, by way of paren- 
thesis, in Plutarch's 'Life of Marc Antony.' There 
Antony was described as emulating at one period of 
his career the life and example of 'Timon Misanthropes 
the Athenian,' and some account of the Athenian's 
perverse experience was given. From Plutarch the 
tale passed into Painter's miscellany of Elizabethan 
romances called 'The Palace of Pleasure.' The author 
of the Shakespearean play may too have known a dia- 
logue of Lucian entitled 'Timon,' which Boiardo, the 
poet of fifteenth century Italy, had previously converted 
into an Italian comedy under the name of 'II Timone.' 

^ Dyce first edited the manuscript, which is now in the Victoria and 
Albert Museum, South Kensington, for the Shakespeare Society in 1842. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 401 

With singular clumsiness the EngKsh piece parts com- 
pany with all preceding versions of Timon's history by 
grafting on the tradition of his misanthropy a shadowy 
and irrelevant fable of the Athenian hero Alci- ^j^^ ^pj. 
biades. A series of subsidiary scenes presents sodeof 
Alcibiades in the throes of a quarrel with the 
Athenian senate over its punishment of a friend ; finally 
he lays siege to the city and compels its rulers to submit 
to his will. Such an incident has no pertinence to 
Timon's fortunes. 

The piece is as reckless a travesty of classical life and 
history as any that came from the pen of a mediaeval 
fabuhst.^ Nowhere is there a glimmer of the ^j^^ 
true Greek spirit. The interval between the divided 
Greek nomenclature and the characterisation or '^^^ °^^ ^^' 
action of the personages is even wider than in 'Troilus 
and Cressida.' Internal evidence makes it clear that the 
groundwork and most of the superstructure of the in- 
coherent tragedy were due to Shakespeare's colleague. 
To that crude pen must be assigned nearly the whole of 
acts III. and v. and substantial portions of the three 
remaining acts. Yet the characters of Timon himself 
and of the churlish cynic Apemantus bear witness to 
Shakespeare's penetration. The greater part of the 
scenes which they dominate owed much to his hand. 
Timon is cast in the psychological mould of Lear. The 
play was printed for the first time in the First Folio from 
a very defective transcript.^ 

^ Although Timon is presented in the play as the contemporary of 
Alcibiades and presumably of the generation of Pericles, he quotes 
Seneca. In much the same way Hector quotes Aristotle in Troilus 
and Cressida. Alcibiades in Timon makes his entry in battle array 
'with drum and fife.' 

2 There is evidence that when the First Foho was originally planned 
the place after Romeo and Juliet which Timon now fills was designed 
for Troilus and Cressida, and that, after the typographical composition 
of Troilus was begun in succession to Romeo, Troilus was set aside with 
a view to transference elsewhere, and the vacant space was hurriedly 
occupied by Timon by way of stop-gap. (See p. 368 n.) The play is 
followed in the Folio by a leaf only printed on one side which contains 
'The Actors' Names.' This arrangement is unique in the First Folio. 



402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

There seems some ground for the belief that Shake- 
speare's anonymous coadjutor in 'Timon' was George 
,p , Wilkins, a writer of ill-developed dramatic 

power, who is known to have written occasion- 
ally for Shakespeare's company. In 1607 that company 
produced Wilkins's 'The Miseries of Enforced Marriage,' 
which was published in the same year and proved popular. 
The piece dealt with a melodramatic case of murder 
which had lately excited pubKc interest. Next year 
the same episode served for the plot of 'The Yorkshire 
Tragedy,' a piece falsely assigned by the publishers to 
Shakespeare's pen. The hectic fury of the criminal hero 
in both these pieces has affinities with the impassioned 
rage of Timon which Shakespeare may have elaborated 
from a first sketch by Wilkins. At any rate, to Wilkins 
may safely be allotted the main authorship of 'Pericles,' 
a romantic play which was composed in the same year 
as 'Timon' and of which Shakespeare was again an- 
nounced as the sole author. During his lifetime and for 
many subsequent years Shakespeare was openly credited 
with the whole of 'Pericles.' Yet the internal evidence 
plainly relieves him of responsibility for the greater part 
of it. 

The frankly pagan tale of 'Pericles Prince of Tyre' 
was invented by a Greek novelist near the opening of the 

Christian era, and enjoyed during the Middle 
original Ages an immense popularity, not merely in a 
Pericles'^ Latin version, but through translations in 

every vernacular speech of Europe. The line- 
age of the Shakespearean drama is somewhat obscured 
by the fact that the hero was given in the play a name 
which he bore in none of the numerous preceding ver- 
sions of his story. The Shakespearean Pericles of Tyre 
is the Apollonius of Tyre who permeates post-classical 
and mediaeval literature. The English dramatist de- 
rived most of his knowledge of the legend from the ren- 
dering of it which John Gower, the English poet of the 
fourteenth century, furnished in his rambling poetic 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 403 

miscellany called 'Confessio Amantis.' A prominent 
figure in the Shakespearean play is ' the chorus ' or ' pre- 
senter ' who explains the action before or during the acts. 
The ' chorus ' bears the name of the poet Gower.^ At the 
same time the sixteenth century saw several versions of 
the veteran tale in both French and Enghsh prose, and 
while the dramatist found his main inspiration in 'old 
Gower' he derived some embellishments of his work from 
an Elizabethan prose rendering of the myth, which first 
appeared in 1576, and reached a third edition in 1607.^ 
Indeed the reissue in 1607 of the Elizabethan version of 
the story doubtless prompted the dramatisation of the 
theme, although the three leading characters of the play, 
Pericles, his wife Thaisa, and his daughter Marina, all 
bear appellations for which there is no previous author- 
ity. The hero's original name of Pericles recalls with 
characteristic haziness the period in Greek history to 
which ' Timon of Athens ' is vaguely assigned.^ 

The ancient fiction of Apollonius of Tyre was a tale of 
adventurous travel, and was inherently in- j^cohe- 
capable of effective dramatic treatment. The rencesof 
rambling scenes of the Shakespearean ' Pericles ' * ^ ^^^^^' 
and the long years which the plot covers tend to inco- 

^ Of the eight speeches of the chorus (filling in all 305 lines), five 
(filling 212 lines) are in the short six- or seven-syllable rhyming couplets 
of Gower's Confessio. 

2 In 1576 the tale was 'gathered into English [prose] by Laurence 
Twine, gentleman ' under the title : ' The Patterne of painefull Aduen- 
tures, containing the most excellent, pleasant, and variable Historic 
of the strange accidents that befell vnto Prince Apollonius, the Lady 
Lucina his wife and Tharsia his daughter. Wherein the vncertaintie 
of this world, and the fickle state of man's life are liuely described. . . . 
Imprinted at London by William How, 1576.' This volume was twice 
reissued (about 1595 and in 1607) before the play was attempted. The 
translator, Laurence Twine, a graduate of All Souls' College, Oxford, 
performed his task without distinction. 

' In all probability the name Pericles confuses reminiscences of the 
Greek Pericles with those of Pyrocles, one of the heroes of Sidney's 
romance of Arcadia, whence Shakespeare had lately borrowed the by- 
plot of King Lear. Richard Flecknoe, writing of the Shakespearean 
play in 1656, called the hero Pyrocles. Musidorus, another hero of 
Sidney's romance, had already supplied the title of the romantic play, 
Mucedorus, which appeared in 1595. 



404 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

herence. Choruses and dumb shows 'stand i' the gaps 
to teach the stages of the story.' Yet numerous refer- 
ences to the piece in contemporary literature attest the 
warm welcome which an uncritical public extended to its 
early representations.^ 

After the first production of ' Pericles ' at the Globe in 
the spring of 1608, Edward Blount, a publisher of literary 
The issues proclivitics, obtained (on May 20, 1608) a 
in quarto. Hcense for the play's publication. But Blount 
failed to exercise his right, and the piece was actually 
published next year by an undistinguished 'stationer,' 
Henry Gosson, then living 'at the sign of the Sunne 
in Paternoster Row.' The exceptionally bad text was 
clearly derived from the notes of an irresponsible short- 
hand reporter of a performance in the theatre. A second 
edition, without correction but with some typographical 
variations, appeared in the same year, and reprints which 
came from other presses in 161 1, 1619, 1630, and 1635,^ 
bear strange witness to the book's popularity. The 
original title-page is couched in ostentatious phraseology 
which sufficiently refutes Shakespeare's responsibility for 

^ In the prologue to Robert Tailor's comedy, The Hogge hath lost his 
Pearle (1614) the writer says of his own piece : — 

If it prove so happy as to please, 
Weele say 'tis fortunate like Pericles. 

On May 24, 1619, the piece was performed at Court on the occasion of 
a great entertainment in honour of the French ambassador, the Marquis 
de Trenouille. The play was still popular in 1630 when Ben Jonson, 
indignant at the failure of his own piece, The New Inn, sneered at ' some 
mouldy tale like Pericles' in his sour ode beginning 'Come leave the 
lothed stage.' On June 10, 1631, the piece was revived before a crowded 
audience at the Globe theatre 'upon the cessation of the plague.' At 
the Restoration Pericles renewed its popularity in the theatre, and Better- 
ton was much applauded in the title role. All the points connected with 
the history and bibliography of the play are discussed in the facsimile 
reproduction of Pericles, ed. by Sidney Lee, Clarendon Press, 1905. 

^ The unnamed printer of both first and second editions would seem 
to have been William White, an inferior workman whose press was near 
Smithfield. White was responsible for the first quarto of Love's Labour's 
Lost in 1598. The second edition of Pericles is easily distinguishable 
from the first by a misprint in the first stage direction. 'En/er Gower' 
of the first edition is reproduced in the second edition as 'Eneer Gower.' 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 405 

the publication. The words run : ' The late and much 
admired play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the 
true relation of the whole Historic, aduentures, and 
fortunes of the said Prince : as also, the no lesse strange 
and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life of his Daugh- 
ter Mariana. As it hath been diuers and sundry times 
acted by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the 
Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.' All the quarto 
editions credit Shakespeare with the sole authorship ; 
but the piece was with much justice excluded from the 
First Folio of 1623 and from the Second Folio of 1632. 
It was not admitted to the collected works of the drama- 
tist until the second issue of the Third Folio in 1664. 

There is no sustained evidence of Shakespeare's handi- 
work in 'Pericles,' save in acts in. and v. and parts of 
act IV. The Shakespearean scenes tell the ghake- 
story of Pericles's daughter Marina. They speare's 
open with the tempest at sea during which she ^^^^^' 
is born, and they close with her final restoration to her 
parents and her betrothal. The style of these scenes is 
in the manner of which Shakespeare gives earnest in 
'King Lear.' The ellipses are often puzzling, but the 
condensed thought is intensely vivid and glows with 
strength and insight. The themes, too, of Shakespeare's 
contribution to 'Pericles' are nearly akin to many 
which figured elsewhere in his latest work. The tone 
of Marina's appeals to Lysimachus and Boult in the 
brothel resembles that of Isabella's speeches in ' Measure 
for Measure.' Thaisa, whom her husband imagines to 
be dead, shares some of the experiences of Hermione in 
'The Winter's Tale.' The portrayal of the shipwreck 
amid which Marina is born adumbrates the opening 
scene of ' The Tempest ' ; and there are ingenuous touches 
in the delineation of Marina which suggest the girlhood 
of Perdita. 

There seems good ground for assuming that the play of 
'Pericles' was originally penned by George Wilkins and 
that it was over his draft that Shakespeare worked. 



4o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

One curious association of Wilkins with the play is 
attested under his own hand. Very soon after the piece 
was staged he pubHshed in his own name a novel 
wlikms's in prose which he asserted to be based upon the 
^p^^^ f . play. The novel preceded by a year the pub- 
lication of the drama, but the fiUal relation 
in which the romance stands to the play is precisely stated 
alike in the title-page of the novel and in its ' argument to 
the whole historic.' The novel bears the title: 'The 
Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Being 
the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately 
presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower.' ^ 
In the 'argument' the reader is requested 'to receive 
this Historic in the same maner as it was under the 
habite of ancient Gower, the famous English Poet, by 
the King's Maiesties Players excellently presented.' ^ 

On the same day (May 20, 1608) that Edward Blount 
obtained his abortive license for the issue of 'Pericles' 
he secured from the Stationers' Company a 
and Cko- sccond liccnsc, also by the authority of Sir 
?6o8^'' George Buc, the licenser of plays, for the pub- 
lication of a far more impressive piece of lit- 
erature — 'a booke called "Anthony and Cleopatra."' 

^ The imprint runs : ' At London. Printed by T[homas] P[avier] 
for Nat. Butter, 1608'; see the reprint edited by Tycho Mommsen 
(Oldenburg, 1857). 

^ At times the language of the drama is exactly copied by Wilkins's 
novel, and, though transferred to prose, preserves the rhythm of blank 
verse. The novel is far more carefully printed than the play, and cor- 
rects some of the manifold corruptions of the printed text of the latter. 
On the other hand Wilkins's novel shows at several points divergence 
from the play. There are places in which the novel develops incidents 
which are barely noticed in the play, and elsewhere the play is somewhat 
fuller than the novel. One or two phrases which have the Shakespearean 
ring are indeed found alone in the novel. A few lines from Shakespeare's 
pen seem to be present there and nowhere else. After the preliminary 
'argument' of the novel, there follows a list of the dramatis personce 
headed 'The names of the Personages mentioned in the Historie' which 
is not to be found in the play, but seems to belong to it. The discrep- 
ancies between the play and novel suggest that Wilkins's novel followed 
a manuscript version of the play different from that on which the printed 
quarto was based. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 407 

No copy of this date is known, and once again the 
company probably hindered the pubhcation. The play 
was first printed in the folio of 1623. Shakespeare's 
'Antony and Cleopatra' is the middle play of Shake- 
speare's Roman trilogy which opened some seven years 
before with 'Julius Caesar' and ended with 'Coriolanus.' 
As in the case of all the poet's Roman plays, the plot of 
'Antony and Cleopatra' comes from Sir Thomas North's 
version of Plutarch's 'Lives.' On the opening section 
of Plutarch's Life of Antony Shakespeare had already 
levied substantial loans in ' JuKus Ceesar.' ^ He now 
produced a full dramatisation of it. The story of 
Antony's love of Cleopatra had passed from pi^tarch's 
classical history into the vague floating tradi- Life of 
tion of mediaeval Europe. Chaucer assigned ^°^^' 
her the first place in his 'Legend of Good Women.' 
But Plutarch's graphic biography of Antony first taught 
western Europe in the early days of the Renaissance the 
whole truth about his relations with the Queen of Egypt. 
Early experiments in the Renaissance drama of Italy, 
France, and England anticipated Shakespeare in turning 
the theme to dramatic uses. The pre-Shakespearean 
dramas of Antony and Cleopatra suggest at some points 
Shakespeare's design. But the resemblances between 
the 'Antony and Cleopatra' of Shakespeare and the 
like efforts of his predecessors at home or abroad seem 
to be due to the universal dependence on Plutarch.^ 

^ Shakespeare showed elsewhere familiarity with the memoir. Into 
the more recent tragedy of Macbeth (iii. i. 54-57) he drew from it a 
pointed reference to Octavius Caesar, and on a digression in Plutarch's 
text he based his lurid sketch of the misanthropy of Tinion of Athens. 

2 The earliest dramatic version of the Plutarchan narrative came 
from an Italian pen about 1540. The author, Giraldi Cinthio of Ferrara, 
is best known by that collection of prose tales, Hecatomniithi, which 
supplied Shakespeare with the plots of Othello and Measure for Measure. 
The topic enjoys the distinction of having inspired the first regular 
tragedy in French literature. This piece, Cleopatre Captive by Estienne 
Jodelle, was published in 1552. Within twenty years of Jodelle's ef- 
fort, the chief dramatist of the French Renaissance, Robert Gamier, 
handled the theme in his tragedy called Marc Antoine. Finally the 
inferior hand of Nicolas de Montreux took up the parable of Cleopatra 



4o8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare follows the lines of Plutarch's biography 
even more loyally than in 'Julius Cassar.' Many trifling 

details which in the play accentuate Cleopatra's 
speare's idiosyncrasy come unaltered from the Greek 
Plutarch ^uthor. The superb description of the barge 

in which the Queen journeys dovv^n the river 
Cydnus to meet Antony is Plutarch's language. Shake- 
speare borrows the supernatural touches, which compli- 
cate the tragic motive. At times, even in the heat of 
the tragedy, the speeches of the hero and heroine and of 
their attendants are transferred bodily from North's 
prose.-^ Not that Shakespeare accepts the whole of the 
episode which Plutarch narrates. Although he adds 
nothing, he makes substantial omissions, and his method 
of selection does not always respect the calls of perspicuity. 
Shakespeare ignores the nine years' interval between 
Antony's first and last meetings with Cleopatra. During 
that period Antony not only did much important political 

in 1594; his five- act tragedy of Cleopatre, alike in construction and 
plot, closely follows Jodelle's Cleopatre Captive. It was such French 
efforts which gave the cue to the dramatic versions of Cleopatra's his- 
tory in Elizabethan England which preceded Shakespeare's work. The 
earliest of these English experiments was a translation of Garnier's 
tragedy. This came from the accomplished pen of Sir Philip Sidney's 
sister, Mary Countess of Pembroke; it was published in 1592. Two 
years later, by way of sequel to the Countess's work, her protege, Daniel, 
issued an original tragedy of Cleopatra on the Senecan pattern. Daniel 
pursued the topic some five years later in an imaginary verse letter 
from Antony's wife Octavia to her husband. A humble camp-follower 
of the Elizabethan army of poets and dramatists, one Samuel Brandon, 
emulated Daniel's example, and contrived in 1598 The tragicomedie 
of the virtuous Octavia. Brandon's catastrophe is the death of Mark 
Antony, and Octavia's jealousy of Cleopatra is the main theme. 

^ George Wyndham, in his introduction to his edition of North's 
Plutarch, i. pp. xciii-c, gives an excellent criticism of the relations of 
Shakespeare's play to Plutarch's life of Antonius. See also M. W. 
MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Background (1910), 
pp. 318 seq. The extent to which the dramatist saturated himself 
with Plutarchan detail may be gauged by the circumstance that he 
christens an attendant at Cleopatra's Court with the name of Larnprius 
(i. ii. I stage direction). The name is accounted for by the fact that 
Plutarch's grandfather of similar name (Lampryas) is parenthetically 
cited by the biographer as hearsay authority for some backstairs gossip 
of the palace at Alexandria. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 409 

work at Rome, but conducted an obstinate war in Par- 
thia and Armenia. Nor does Shakespeare take cog- 
nisance of the eight or nine months which separate 
Antony's defeat at Actium from his rout under the 
walls of Alexandria. With the complex series of events, 
which Shakespeare cuts adrift, his heroine has no concern, 
yet the neglected incident leaves in the play some jagged 
edges which impair its coherence and symmetry. 

Shakespeare is no slavish disciple of Plutarch. The 
dramatist's mind is concentrated on Antony's infatuation 
for Cleopatra, and there he expands and de- shake- 
velops Plutarch's story with magnificent free- speare's 
dom and originality. The leading events and of the 
characters, which Shakespeare drew from the ^^°^- 
Greek biography, are, despite his liberal borrowings of 
phrase and fact, re-incarnated in the crucible of the 
poet's imagination, so that they glow in his verse with an 
heroic and poetic glamour of which Plutarch gives faint 
conception. All the scenes which Antony and Cleopatra 
dominate show Shakespeare's mastery of dramatic 
emotion at its height. It is doubtful if any of his cre- 
ations, male or female, deserve a rank in his great gal- 
lery higher than that of the Queen of Egypt for artistic 
completeness of conception or sureness of touch in dra- 
matic execution. It is almost adequate comment on 
Antony's character to affirm that he is a worthy com- 
panion of Cleopatra. The notes of roughness and sen- 
suality in his temperament are ultimately sublimated 
by a vein of poetry, which lends singular beauty to all 
his farewell utterances. Herein he resembles Shake- 
speare's Richard II and Macbeth, in both of whom a 
native poetic sentiment is quickened by despair. Among 
the minor personages, Enobarbus, Antony's disciple, is 
especially worthy of study. His frank criticism of 
passing events invests him through the early portions of 
the play with the function of a chorus who sardonically 
warns the protagonists of the destiny awaiting their 
delinquencies and follies. 



4IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The metre and style of 'Antony and Cleopatra/ when 
they are compared with the metre and style of the great 
The style tragedies of earher date, plainly indicate fresh 
of the development of faculty and design. The ten- 

piece, dency to spasmodic and disjointed effects, 

of which 'King Lear' gives the earliest warnings, has 
become habitual, Coleridge appHed to the language 
of 'Antony and Cleopatra' the Latin motto 'feliciter 
audax.' He credited -the dramatic diction with 'a happy 
valiancy,' a description which could not be bettered. 
Throughout the piece, the speeches of great and small 
characters are instinct with figurative allusiveness and 
metaphorical subtlety, which, however hard to para- 
phrase or analyse, convey an impression of sublimity. 
At the same time, in their moments of supreme exalta- 
tion, both Antony and Cleopatra employ direct language 
which is innocent of rhetorical involution. But the tone 
of sublimity commonly seeks sustenance in unexpected 
complexities of phrase. Occasional lines tremble on the 
verge of the grotesque. But Shakespeare's 'angelic 
strength' preserves him from the perils of bombast.^ 

Internal evidence points with no uncertain finger to the 
late months of 1608 or early months of 1609 as the period 
'Corioia- of the birth of ' Coriolanus,' the last piece of 
^"^•' Shakespeare's Roman trilogy. The tragedy 

was first printed in the First Folio of 1623 from a singu- 
larly bad transcript.^ The irregularities of metre, the 
ellipses of style closely associate 'Coriolanus' with 
'Antony and Cleopatra.' The metaphors and similes 
of 'Coriolanus' are hardly less abundant than in the 
previous tragedy and no less vivid. Yet the austerity 

^ A full review of the play and its analogues by the present writer 
appears in the introduction to the text in the 'Caxton' Shakespeare. 

^ Ben Jonson's Silent Woman, which is known to have been first 
acted in 1609, seems to echo a phrase of Shakespeare's play. In 11. ii. 
105 Cominius says of the hero's feats in youth that 'he lurch'd [i.e. de- 
prived] all swords of the garland.' The phrase has an uncommon ring 
and it would be in full accordance with Jonson's habit to have assimilated 
it, when he penned the sentence, 'Well, Dauphin, you have lurched your 
friends of the better half of the garland' (Silent Woman, v. iv. 227-8). 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 411 

of Coriolanus' tragic story is the ethical antithesis of the 
passionate subtlety of the story of Antony and his mis- 
tress, and the contrast renders the tragedy a fitting 
sequel. 

As far as is known, only one dramatist in Europe an- 
ticipated Shakespeare in turning Coriolanus' fate to 
dramatic purposes. Shakespeare's single predecessor 
was his French contemporary Alexandre Hardy, who, 
freely interpreting Senecan principles of drama, pro- 
duced his tragedy of 'Coriolan' on the Parisian stage 
for the first time in 1607.^ 

Coriolanus' story, as narrated by the Roman historian 
Livy, had served in Shakespeare's youth for material of a 
prose tale in Painter's well-known 'Palace of The fidelity 
Pleasure.' There Shakespeare doubtless made to 
the acquaintance of his hero for the first time. 
But once again the dramatist sought his main authority 
in a biography of Plutarch, and he presented Plutarch's 
leading facts in his play with a documentary fidelity 
which excels any earlier practice. He amplifies some 
subsidiary details and omits or contracts others. Yet 
the longest speeches in the play — the hero's address 
to the Volscian general, Aufidius, when he offers him his 
mihtary services, and Volumnia's great appeal to her 
son to rescue his fellow-countrymen from the perils to 
which his desertion is exposing them — both transcribe 
with small variation for two-thirds of their length 
Plutarch's language. There is magical vigour in the 
original interpolations. But the identity of phraseology 
is almost as striking as the changes or amplifications.^ 

1 Hardy declared that 'few subjects will be found in Roman history 
to be worthier of the stage' than Coriolanus. The simplicity of the 
tragic motive with its filial sentiment well harmonises with French 
ideals of classical drama and with the French domestic temperament. 
For more than two centuries the seed which Hardy had sown bore fruit 
in France; and no less than three-and-twenty tragedies on the subject 
of Coriolanus have blossomed since Hardy's day in the French theatres. 

2 In Plutarch, Coriolanus' first words to Aufidius in his own house run : 
'If thou knowest me not yet, Tullus, and seeing me, dost not believe 
me to be the man that I am indeed, I must of necessity betray myself 



412 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Despite such liberal levies on Plutarch's text Shake- 
speare imbues Plutarch's theme with a new vivacity. 

The unity of interest and the singleness of the 
cha^racters dramatic purposc render the tragedy nearly as 
^^ ^^^, complete a triumph of dramatic art as ' Othello.' 

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is cast in a Titanic 
mould. No turn in the wheel of fortune can modify that 
colossal sense of the sacredness of caste with which his 
mother's milk has infected him. Coriolanus' mother, 
Volumnia, is as vivid and finished a picture as the hero 
himself. Her portrait, indeed, is a greater original effort, 
for it owes much less to Plutarch's inspiration. From her 
Coriolanus derives alike his patrician prejudice and his 
military ambition. But in one regard Volumnia is greater 
than her stubborn heir. The keenness and pliancy of 

to be that I am.' In Shakespeare Coriolanus speaks on the same oc- 
casion thus : 

If Tullus, 

Not yet thou knowest me, and, seeing me, dost not 

Think me for the man I am, necessity 

Commands me name myself, (iv. v. 54-57.) 

Volumnia's speech offers like illustration of Shakespeare's dependence. 
Plutarch assigns to Volumnia this sentence : ' So though the end of 
war be uncertain, yet this, notwithstanding, is most certain that if it 
be thy chance to conquer, this benefit shalt thou reap of this thy goodly 
conquest to be chronicled the plague and destroyer of thy country.' 
Shakespeare transliterates with rare dramatic effect (v. iii. 140-148) : 

Thou know'st, great son. 
The end of war's uncertain, but this certain, 
That if thou conquer Rome, the benefit 
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name 
Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses ; 
Whose chronicle thus writ : ' The man was noble, 
But with his last attempt he wiped it out. 
Destroy 'd his country, and his name remains 
To the ensuing age abhorr'd.' 

Like examples of Shakespeare's method of assimilation might be quoted 
from Coriolanus' heated speeches to ,the tribunes and his censures of 
democracy (act iii. sc. i.). The account which the tribune Brutus 
gives of Coriolanus' ancestry (11. iii. 234 seq.) is so literally paraphrased 
from Plutarch that an obvious hiatus in the corrupt text of the play 
which the syntax requires to be filled, is easily supplied from North's 
page. A full review of the play and its analogues by the present writer 
appears in the introduction to the text in the 'Caxton' Shakespeare. 



THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY 413 

her intellect have no counterpart in his nature. Very 
artistically are the other female characters of the tragedy, 
Coriolanus' wife, Virgilia, and Virgilia's friend Valeria, 
presented as Volumnia's foils. Valeria is a high-spirited 
and honourable lady of fashion, with a predilection for 
frivolous pleasure and easy gossip. Virgilia is a gentle 
wife and mother, who well earns Coriolanus' apostrophe 
of 'gracious silence.' Of other subsidiary characters, 
Menenius Agrippa, Coriolanus' old friend and coun- 
sellor, is a touching portrait of fidelity to which Shake- 
speare lends a significance unattempted by Plutarch. 
Throughout the tragedy Menenius criticises the progress 
of events with ironical detachment after the manner of 
a chorus in classical tragedy. His place in the dramatic 
scheme resembles that of Enobarbus in 'Antony and 
Cleopatra,' and the turn of events involves him in almost 
as melancholy a fate. 

More important to the dramatic development are the 
spokesmen of the mob and their leaders, the tribunes 
Brutus and Sicinius. The dark colours in ThepoHt- 
which Shakespeare paints the popular faction are icai crisis 
often held to reflect a personal predilection for ° ^ ^p ^y- 
aristocratic predominance in the body politic or for feudal 
conditions of political society. It is, however, very 
doubtful whether Shakespeare, in his portrayal of the 
Roman crowd, was conscious of any intention save that 
of dramatically interpreting the social and political en- 
vironment which Plutarch allots to Coriolanus' career. 
The political situation which Plutarch described was 
alien to the experience of Shakespeare and his con- 
temporaries. Shakespeare was in all likelihood merely 
moved by the artistic and purely objective ambition of 
investing unfamiliar episode with dramatic plausibility. 
No personal malice nor political design need be imputed 
to the dramatist's repeated references to the citizens' 
' strong breaths ' or ' greasy caps ' which were conventional 
phrases in Elizabethan drama. Whatever failings are 
assigned to the plebeians in the tragedy of 'Coriolanus,' 



414 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

it is patrician defiance of the natural instinct of patri- 
otism which brings about the catastrophe, and works the 
fatal disaster. Shakespeare's detached but inveterate 
sense of justice holds the balance true between the rival 
political interests. 



XIX 

THE LATEST PLAYS 

Through the first decade of the seventeenth century, 
when Shakespeare's powers were at their zenith, he de- 
voted his energies, as we have seen, almost shake- 
exclusively to tragedy. During the years that fP^^^''^'^ 
intervened between the composition of 'Julius period,' 
Cassar,' in 1600, and that of 'Coriolanus,' in i6oo-9- 
1609, tragic themes of solemn import occupied his pen 
unceasingly. The gleams of humour which illumined a 
few scenes scarcely reHeved the sombre atmosphere. 
Seven plays in the great tragic series — 'Julius Caesar,' 
'Hamlet,' 'Othello,' 'Macbeth,' 'King Lear,' 'Antony 
and Cleopatra,' and 'Coriolanus' — won for their author 
the pre-eminent place among workers in the tragic art of 
every age and clime. A popular theory presumes that 
Shakespeare's decade of tragedy was the outcome of 
some spiritual calamity, of some episode of tragic gloom 
in his private life. No tangible evidence supports the al- 
legation. The external facts of Shakespeare's biography 
through the main epoch of his tragic energy show an 
unbroken progress of prosperity, a final farewell to pe- 
cuniary anxieties, and the general recognition of his 
towering genius by contemporary opinion. The bio- 
graphic record lends no support to the suggestion of a 
prolonged personal experience of tragic suffering. Nor 
does the general trend of his literary activities coun- 
tenance the nebulous theory. Tragedy was no new 
venture for Shakespeare when the seventeenth century 
opened. His experiments in that branch of drama 
date from his earliest years. Near the outset of his 
career he had given signal proof of his tragic power in 

415 



41 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

'Romeo and Juliet/ in 'King John,' in 'Richard 11/ and 
'Richard III.' Into his comedies 'The Merchant of 
Venice/ 'Much Ado/ and 'Twelfth Night/ he imported 
tragic touches. With his advance in years there came 
in comedy and tragedy alike a larger grasp of life, a 
firmer style, a richer thought. Ultimately, tragedy 
rather than comedy gave him the requisite scope for the 
full exercise of his matured endowments, by virtue of the 
inevitable laws governing the development of dramatic 
genius. To seek in the necessarily narrow range of his 
personal experience the key to Shakespeare's triumphant 
conquest of the topmost peaks of tragedy is to underrate 
his creative faculty and to disparage the force of its magic. 

In the Elizabethan realm of letters interest combined 
with instinct to encourage the tragic direction of Shake- 
Popularity speare's dramatic aptitudes. Public taste gave 
of tragedy, tragedy a supreme place in the theatre. It 
was on those who excelled in tragic drama that the 
highest rewards and the loudest applause were bestowed. 
There is much significance in the circumstance that 
Shakespeare's tragedy of 'King Lear,' the most appalling 
of all tragedies, was chosen for presentation at White- 
hall on the opening of the joyous Christmas festivities 
of i6o6. The Court's choice was dictated by the prev- 
alent literary feeling. Shakespeare's devotion to tragedy 
at the zenith of his career finds all the explanation that 
is needed in the fact that he was a great poet and dra- 
matic artist whose progressive power was in closest 
touch and surest sympathy with current predilections.^ 

There is no conflict with this conclusion in the circum- 
stance that after completing ' Coriolanus,' the eighth 
drama in the well-nigh uninterrupted suc- 
speare's ccssion of his tragic masterpieces. Shake- 
return to speare turned from the storm and stress of 

romance. ^ , , r i i r t 

great tragedy to the serener field oi medita- 
tive romance. A relaxation of the prolonged tragic strain 

^ Cf. the present writer's essay on 'The Impersonal Aspect of Shake- 
speare's Art' (English Association Leaflet, No. 13, July 1909). 



THE LATEST PLAYS 417 

was needed by both author and audience. Again the 
dramatist was pursuing a path which at once harmo- 
nised with the playgoers' idiosyncrasy and conformed 
with the conditions of his art. 

The Ehzabethan stage had under Italian or Franco- 
ItaHan influence welcomed from early days, by way of 
relief from the strenuousness of unqualified tragedy, 
experiments in tragicomedy or romantic comedy which 
aimed at a fusion of tragic and comic elements. At 
first the result was a crude mingling of ingredients which 
refused to coalesce.^ But by slow degrees there devel- 
oped an harmonious form of drama, technically known 
as 'tragicomedy,' in which a romantic theme, while it 
admitted tragic episode, ended happily and was imbued 
with a sentimental pathos unknown to either regular 
comedy or regular tragedy. Shakespeare's romantic 
dramas of 'Much Ado' and 'Twelfth Night' had at the 
end of the sixteenth century first indicated the artistic 
capabilities of this middle term in drama. 'Measure 
for Measure,' which was penned in 1604, respected the 
essential conditions of a tragicomedy. The main issues 
fell within the verge of tragedy, but left the tragic path 
before they reached solution. In the years that immedi- 
ately followed, Shakespeare's juniors applied much in- 
dependent energy to popularising the mixed dramatic 
type. George Chapman's 'The Gentleman Usher,' 
which was published early in 1606 after its performance 
at the Blackfriars Theatre by the Children of the Chapel, 
has all the features of a full-fledged tragicomedy. As in 
'Twelfth Night' and 'Much Ado,' serious romance is 
linked with much comic episode, but the incident is 
penetrated by strenuous romantic sentiment and stern 
griefs and trials reach a peaceful solution. The exam- 
ple was turned to very effective account by Francis 

^ The best known specimen of the early type is Richard Edwards's 
empiric 'tragicall comedy' of Damon and Pythias, which dates from 1566. 
See pp. 93, 217 supra. For better-developed specimens on the contem- 
porary French stage which helped to direct the development in England, 
cf. Lee's French Renaissance in England, 408 seq. 



41.8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Beaumont and John Fletcher, who, soon after their 
Hterary partnership opened in 1607, enhsted in the ser- 
vice of Shakespeare's company. In their three popular 
plays 'The Faithful Shepherdess,' 'Philaster,' and 'A 
King and no King,' they succeeded in establishing for 
a generation the vogue of tragicomedy on the Enghsh 
stage. It was to the tragicomic movement, which his 
ablest contemporaries had already espoused with public 
approval, that Shakespeare lent his potent countenance 
in the latest plays which came from his unaided pen. 
In ' Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The Tempest,' 
Shakespeare appHed himself to perfecting the newest 
phases of romantic drama. 'Cymbeline' and 'The 
Winter's Tale,' which immediately followed his great 
tragic efforts, are the best specimens of tragicomedy 
which literature knows. Although 'The Tempest' 
differs constructively from its companions, it completes 
the trilogy of which 'Cymbeline' and 'The Winter's 
Tale' are the first and second instalments. If 'The 
Tempest' come no nearer ordinary comedy than they, 
it is further removed from ordinary tragedy.^ But it 

^ Beaumont and Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess and Philaster, 
or Love Lies a Bleeding, both of which may be classed with tragicomedies, 
would each seem to have been written in 1609, and the evidence suggests 
that they were the precursors rather than the successors of Cymbeline 
and The Winter's Tale (cf. Ashley Thorndike's The Influence of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, Worcester, Mass., 1901, chaps, ix. 
and X.). Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and no King, which also 
obeyed the laws of tragicomedy, was written before 16 11 and was in 
all probability in course of composition at the same time as Cymbeline. 
All three pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted by Shakespeare's 
company. Guarini's Pastor Fido, the Italian pastoral drama, was very 
popular in England early in the seventeenth century and influenced 
the sentiment of Jacobean tragicomedy. In Fletcher's 'Address to 
the Reader' before The Faithful Shepherdess, of which the first edition 
is an undated quarto assignable to 1609-10, a tragicomedy is thus de- 
fined in language silently borrowed from a critical essay of Guarini : 
'A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in 
respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet 
brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must 
be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no 
life be questioned.' (Cf. F. H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy, New 
York, 1910, p. 107; T. M. Parrott's Comedies of George Chapman, 
pp. 757 seq.) 



THE LATEST PLAYS 419 

belongs to the category of its two predecessors by virtue 
of its romantic spirit, of the plenitude of its poetry, of 
its solemnity of tone, of its avoidance of the arbitrament 
of death. 

None of these three pieces was published in Shake- 
speare's lifetime. All were first printed in the First Foho, 
and the places they hold in that volume lack The 
justification. Although 'The Tempest' was romantic 
the last play which Shakespeare completed, it and the 
fills the first place in the First Foho, standing ^'^^^^ ^°^^°- 
at the head of the section of comedies. 'The Winter's 
Tale,' in spite of its composition just before 'The Tem- 
pest,' occupies the last place of the same section, being 
separated from 'The Tempest' by the whole range of 
Shakespeare's endeavours in comedy. With even greater 
inconsistency, ' Cymbeline ' comes at the very end of the 
First FoHo, filling the last place in the third and last 
section of tragedies. It is clear that the editors of the 
volume completely misconceived the chronological and 
critical relations of the three plays, alike to one another 
and to the rest of Shakespeare's work. They failed to 
recognise the distinctive branch of dramatic art to which 
'Cymbeline' belonged, and they set it among Shake- 
speare's tragedies with which it bore small logical affinity. 
Nor was 'The Tempest' nor 'The Winter's Tale' justly 
numbered among the comedies without a radical quaH- 
fication of that term. 

It is mainly internal evidence — points of style, lan- 
guage, metre, characterisation — which proves that the 
three plays 'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' Perform- 
and 'The Tempest' belonged to the close of th "three 
Shakespeare's career. The metrical irregular- latest plays 

• , during 

ity, the condensed imagery, the abrupt turns 1611. 
of subtle thought, associate the three pieces very closely 
with 'Antony and Cleopatra' and 'Coriolanus.' The 
discerning student recognises throughout the romantic 
trilogy the latest phase of Shakespeare's dramatic manner. 
The composition of 'CymbeHne' and 'The Winter's 



420 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Tale' may be best assigned to the spring and autumn 
respectively of 1610, and 'The Tempest' to the early 
months of the following year. External evidence shows 
that the three plays stood high in popular favour through 
the year 161 1. Henry Manningham, the Middle Tem- 
ple barrister, who described a performance of 'Twelfth 
Night' in the Hall of his Inn in February 160 1-2, was 
not the only contemporary reporter of early perform- 
ances of Shakespeare's plays in London. Simon Forman, 
a prosperous London astrologer and quack doctor, also 
kept notes of his playgoing experiences in the metropolis 
a few years later. In the same notebook in which he 
described how he attended a revival of 'Macbeth' at 
the Globe theatre in April 16 10, he recorded that on 
May 15, 161 1, he visited the same theatre and witnessed 
'The Winter's Tale.' The next entry, which is without 
a date, gives a fairly accurate sketch of the complicated 
plot of Shakespeare's ' Cymbeline.' ^ Forman's notes 
do not suggest that he was present at the first production 
of any of the cited pieces ; but it is clear that ' The 
Winter's Tale' and 'Cymbeline,' were, when he wrote 
of them, each of comparatively recent birth. Within 
six months of the date of Forman's entries 'The Tem- 
pest' was performed at Court (Nov. i, 161 1) and a pro- 
duction of 'The Winter's Tale' before royalty followed 
in four days (Nov. 5, 1611).^ 

^ Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 86 ; cf . p. 1 25 n. supra. 

2 The entries of The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in the Booke of 
the Revells (October 31, 1611-November i, 161 2) in the Public Record 
Office were long under suspicion of forgery. But their authenticity- 
is now established. See Ernest Law's Some supposed Shakespeare 
Forgeries, 191 1, and his More about Shakespeare Forgeries, 1913. The 
Booke of the Revells in question was printed in Cunningham's Extracts 
from the Account of the Revels at Court, p. 210. In 1809 Malone, who 
examined the Revels Accounts, wrote of The Tempest, '1 know that it 
had "a being and a name" in the autumn of 1611,' and he concluded 
that it was penned in the spring of that year. {Variorum Shakespeare, 
1821, XV. 423.) The Council's warrant, giving particulars of the pay- 
ment of the actors for their services at Court during the year 1611-12, 
is in the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, Bodleian Library 
MS. Rawl. A 204 (f . 305) ; the warrant omits all names of plays. 



THE LATEST PLAYS 421 

In 'CymbeKne' Shakespeare weaves together three 
distinct threads of story, two of which he derives from 
well-known literary repertories. The first The triple 
thread concerns a political quarrel between Pcy^bg. 
ancient Britain, when it was a Roman province, line.' 
and the empire of Rome, which claimed supreme domin- 
ion over it. Shakespeare derived his Brito-Roman 
incident from Holinshed's ' Chronicle,' a volume whence 
he had already drawn much legend as well as authentic 
history. His pusillanimous hero Cymbeline, King of 
Britain, is a late successor of King Lear and nearly the 
last of Lear's line. The second thread of the plot of 
'Cymbeline,' which concerns the experiences of the 
heroine Imogen, comes with variations from a well-known 
novel of Boccaccio. There Shakespeare's heroine was 
known as Ginevra; her husband (Shakespeare's Post- 
humus) as Bernabo ; and his treacherous friend (Shake- 
speare's lachimo) as Ambrogiuolo. Boccaccio antici- 
pates Shakespeare in the main fortunes of Imogen, in- 
cluding her escape in boy's attire from the death which 
her husband designs for her. But Shakespeare recon- 
structs the subsequent adventures which lead to her 
reconciliation with her husband. Boccaccio's tale was 
crudely adapted for English readers in a popular mis- 
cellany of fiction entitled 'Westward for Smelts, or the 
Waterman's Fare of Mad Merry Western Wenches, 
whose tongues albeit, like Bell-clappers, they never 
leave ringing, yet their Tales are sweet, and will much 
content you : Written by kinde Kitt of Kings tone.' 
This fantastically named book was, according to Malone 
and Steevens, first published in London in 1603, but no 
edition earlier than 1620 is known. Episodes analogous 
to those which form the plot of Shakespeare's 'Merry 
Wives of Windsor' appear in the volume. But on any 
showing the indebtedness of the dramatist's 'Cymbeline' 
to it is slender. He follows far more loyally Boccaccio's 
original text. Shakespeare would seem to have himself 
invented the play's third thread of story, the banish- 



42 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

merit from the British Court of the lord, Belarius, who, 
in revenge for his expatriation, kidnapped the king's 
young sons and brought them up with him in the recesses 
of the mountains. 

Although most of the scenes of 'Cymbeline' are laid 

in Britain in the first century before the Christian era, 

there is no pretence of historical vraisemblance. 

tion and With an almost ludicrous inappropriateness, 

character- |-]^g British King's courtiers make merry with 

isation. I'l T ^i-.-ii 

technical terms peculiar to Calvimstic theology, 
like 'grace' and 'election.'^ The action, which, owing 
to the combination of the three threads of narrative, is 
varied and intricate, wholly belongs to the region of 
romance. But the dramatist atones for the remoteness 
of the incident and the looseness of construction by in- 
vesting the characters with a rare wealth of vivacious 
humanity. The background of the picture is unreal; 
but the figures in the foreground are instinct with life and 
poetry. On Imogen, who is the main pillar of the action, 
Shakespeare lavished all the fascination of his genius. 
She is the crown and flower of his conception of tender 
and artless womanhood. She pervades and animates the 
whole piece as an angel of light, who harmonises its dis- 
cursive and discordant elements. Her weakly suspicious 
husband Posthumus, her rejected lover the brutish Clo- 
ten, her would-be seducer lachimo are contrasted with 
her and with each other with luminous ingenuity. The 
mountain passes of Wales in which Belarius and his 
fascinating boy-companions play their part have some 
points of resemblance to the Forest of Arden in 'As You 
Like It ' ; but life throughout ' Cymbehne ' is grimly 
earnest, and the rude and bracing Welsh mountains 
nurture little of the contemplative quiet which char- 
acterises existence on the sylvan levels of Arden. Save 
in a part of one scene, no doubt is permissible of Shake- 

^ In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as 'past grace' in the theological 
sense. In i. ii. 30-31 the Second Lord remarks : 'If it be a sin to make 
a true election, she is damned.' 



THE LATEST PLAYS 423 

speare's sole responsibility. In the fourth scene of the 
fourth act (11. 30 seq.) the husband Posthumus, when 
imprisoned by Cymbeline, King of Britain, sees in an 
irrelevant vision his parents and his brothers, who sum- 
mon Jupiter to restore his broken fortunes. All here is 
pitiful mummery, which may be assigned to an incom- 
petent coadjutor. Any suspicion elsewhere that Shake- 
speare's imagination has suffered in energy is dispelled 
by the lyrical dirge 'Fear no more the heat of the sun,' 
which for perfect sureness of thought and expression has 
no parallel in the songs of previous years. The deaths of 
Cloten and his mother signalise the romantic triumph of 
Imogen's virtue over wrong, and accentuate the serious 
aspects of Kfe without exciting tragic emotion. 

Far simpler than the plot of 'Cymbeline' is that of 
'The Winter's Tale,' which was seen by Dr. Forman at 
the Globe on May 15, 1611, and was acted at .-pj^^ 
Court on November 5 following.^ The play winter's 
was wholly based upon a popular English ^^' 
romance of euphuistic temper which was called 'Pandosto' 
in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later edi- 
tions, but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened 'Dorastus 
and Fawnia.' Shakespeare's constructive method in 
'The Winter's Tale' resembled that which he pursued 
in 'As You Like It,' when he converted into a play a 
recent English romance, 'Rosalynde,' by Thomas Lodge. 
Some irony attaches to Shakespeare's choice of authority 
for the later play. The writer of the novel which Shake- 
speare dramatised there was Robert Greene, The debt 
who, on his deathbed, some eighteen years to Greene's 
before, had attacked the dramatist with much ^^^^ ' 
bitterness when his great career was opening. In many 

^ Camillo's reflections (i. ii. 358) on the ruin that attends those who 
'struck anointed kings' have been regarded, not quite conclusively, as 
specially designed to gratify James I. The name of the play belongs to 
the same category' as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Ticelfth Night. 
The expression 'a winter's tale' was in common use for a serious story, 
but the dramatist may possibly echo here Las Noches de Invierno ('The 
Winter Evenings'), the title of a collection of Spanish tales (Madrid, 
1609) to which he may have had access, see p. 427 w. i. 



424 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ways Shakespeare in 'The Winter's Tale' was more 
loyal to the invention of his early foe than scholarship 
or art quite justified, Shakespeare followed Greene in 
allotting a seashore to Bohemia — an error over which 
Ben Jonson and many later critics have made merry.' 
The dramatist, like the novelist, located in the island of 
Delphos, instead of on the mainland of Phocis, the 
Delphic oracle of Apollo which a pseudo-classical pro- 
clivity irrelevantly brought into the story. The scheme 
of the piece suggests an undue deference on the play- 
wright's part to the conditions of the novel. The action 
of the play is bluntly cut in two by an interval of sixteen 
years, which elapse between the close of act iii. and the 
opening of act iv., and the speech of the chorus personi- 
fying Time proves barely able to bridge the chasm. The 
incidental deaths of two subsidiary good characters — 
the boy Mamihus and the kindly old courtier Antigonus 
— somewhat infringe the placid canons of romance. The 
second death is an invention of the dramatist. Shake- 
speare's dependence on Greene's narrative was indeed far 
from servile. After his wont he rechristened the char- 
acters, and he modified the spirit of the fable wherever 
his dramatic instinct prompted change. In the novel 
bold familiarities between Bellaria, Shakespeare's Her- 
mione, and Egistus, Shakespeare's Polixenes, lend some 
colour to the jealousy of Pandosto, Shakespeare's 
speare's Lcontcs. In Shakespcarc's play all excuse for 
innova- -(-j^g husband's suspicions of his wife is swept 

Lions. 

away. In the novel Bellaria dies of grief on 
hearing of the death of her son Gerintes, Shakespeare's 
Mamilius. Hermione's long and secret retirement and 
her final reconciliation with Leontes are episodes of 
Shakespeare's coinage. At the same time he created 
the character of Paulina, Hermione's outspoken friend 
and companion, and he provided from his own resources 
welcome comic relief in the gipsy pedlar and thief Auto- 
lycus, who is skilled in all the patter of the cheap Jack 

^ Conversations with Drummond, p. i6. 



THE LATEST PLAYS 425 

and sings with a light heart many popular airs. A few 
lines in one of Autolycus's speeches were obviously drawn 
from that story of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare 
had dealt just before in 'Cymbeline.' ^ But the rogue 
is essentially a creature of Shakespeare's fashioning. 

Leontes' causeless jealousy, which is the motive of 
'The Winter's Tale,' has nothing in common with the 
towering passion of Othello. Nor is it cast in .pj^^ 
quite the same mould as the wrongful suspicion freshness 
which Posthumus cherishes of Imogen at ° ^°^^' 
lachimo's prompting in 'Cymbeline.' Leontes' jealousy 
is the aberration of a weak mind and owes nothing to 
external pressure. The husband's feeble wrath is finely 
contrasted with his wife's gentle composure and patient 
fortitude in the presence of unwarrantable suffering which 
moves pathos of an infinite poignancy. The boy Mamil- 
ius is of near kin to the boys in 'Cymbeline.' Nowhere 
has the dramatist portrayed more convincingly boyhood's 
charm, quickness of perception or innocence. Perdita 
develops the ethereal model of Marina in 'Pericles' and 
shows tender ingenuous girlhood moulded by Nature's 
hand and free of the contamination of social artifice. 
The courtship of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of 
gentle romance. The freshness, too, of the pastoral 
incident surpasses that of all Shakespeare's presentations 
of country Hfe. Shakespeare's final labours in tragi- 
comedy betray ,an enhanced mastery of the ' simple as 
well as of the complex aspect of human experience. 

'The Tempest' was probably the latest drama that 
Shakespeare completed. While chronologically and or- 
ganically it is closely bound to 'Cymbeline' and 'The 

^ In The Winter's Tale (iv. iv. 812 et seq.) Autolycus threatens that 
the clown's son 'shall be flayed alive; then 'nointed over with honey, 
set on the head of a wasp's nest,' &c. In Boccaccio's story of Ginevra 
(Shakespeare's Imogen) the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare's lachimo), 
after 'being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,' was 'to his 
exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps 
and gadflies wherewith that country abounded' (cf. Decameron, transl. 
John Payne, i. 164). See also Apuleius' Golden Ass, bk. viii. c. 35. 



426 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Winter's Tale,' it pursues a path of its own. It chal- 
lenges familiar laws of life and nature far more openly 
'The than either of its immediate predecessors. Yet 

Tempest.' ^j^g dramatist's creative power has fired his 
impalpable texture with a living sentiment and emotion 
which are the finest flower of poetic romance. 'The 
Tempest' has affinities with the 'Midsummer Night's 
Dream.' In both pieces supernatural fancies play a 
prominent part. But the contrasts are more notable 
than the resemblances. The bustling energy of the 
'Dream' is replaced in 'The Tempest' by a steadily 
progressive calm. The poetry of the later drama rings 
with a greater profundity and a stronger human sym- 
pathy. 'The Tempest's' echoes of classical poetry are 
less numerous or distinct than those of the 'Dream.' 
Yet into Prospero's great speech renouncing his practice 
of magical art (v. i. 33-37) Shakespeare wrought literal 
reminiscences of Golding's translation of Medea's invoca- 
tion in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (vii. 197-206). Gold- 
ing's rendering of Ovid had been one of Shakespeare's 
best-loved books in youth, and his parting tribute proves 
the permanence of his early impressions, in spite of his 
widened interests. 

In 'The Tempest' Shakespeare accepted two main 
cues, one from pre-existing romantic literature and the 
The other from current reports of contemporary 

sources of advcuture. The main theme of the exiled 
the abe. magician and his daughter was probably bor- 
rowed from a popular romance of old standing in many 
foreign tongues.^ The episode of the storm and the con- 
ception of Caliban were more obvious fruit of reported 
incident in recent voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, 

Several Spanish novelists, whose work was circulating 

^ The name Prospero, which Shakespeare first bestowed on the 
magician, would seem to have been drawn from the first draft of Ben 
Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (1598), where all the characters bear 
Italian names (in later editions changed into English). Ben Jonson 
afterwards christened his character of Prospero by the name of 
Wellbred. 



THE LATEST PLAYS 427 

in cultured English circles, had lately told of magicians 
of princely or ducal rank exiled by usurpers from their 
home to mysteriously remote retreats, in the company of 
an only daughter who was ultimately wooed and won by 
the son of the magician's archfoe.^ In the ' Comedia von 
der schonen Sidea,' a German play written about 1595, 
by Jacob Ayrer, a dramatist of Nuremberg, there are, 
moreover, adumbrations not only of the magician Pros- 
pero, his daughter Miranda, and her lover Ferdinand, 
but also of Ariel.^ English actors were performing at 
Nuremberg, where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and 
may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare, 
or both German and English dramatists may have fol- 

^ Spanish romance was well known in Elizabethan England, as is 
shown by the vogue of Montemayor's Diana, which includes a story 
analogous to that of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen. In the seventeenth 
century Spanish stories were repeatedly dramatised in England. Shake- 
speare's coadjutor Fletcher based numerous plays on the Exemplary 
Novels of Cervantes and the fiction of other Spaniards. A Spanish 
collection of short tales by Antonio de Eslava, bearing the general 
title ' Primera Parte de las Noches de Invierno ' — ' The First Part of 
the Winter Evenings' (Madrid 1609) — includes the story of Dardanus, 
a king of Bulgaria, a virtuous magician, who, being dethroned by Nice- 
phorus, a usurping emperor of Greece, sails away with his only daughter 
Seraphina in a little ship, and in mid-ocean creates a beautiful submarine 
palace for their residence. There the girl grows up like Miranda on 
the desert island. When she reaches womanhood, the magician, dis- 
guised as a fisherman, captures the son of his usurping foe and brings 
the youth to his dwelling under the sea. The girl's marriage with the 
kidnapped prince follows. The usurper dies and the magician is re- 
stored to his kingdom, but finally he transfers his power to his daughter 
and son-in-law. On such a foundation Shakespeare's fable of Prospero 
might conceivably have been reared. 

2 In the German play, which is printed in Cohn's Shakespeare in 
Germany, a noble magician, Ludolph, prince of Lithuania, being defeated 
in battle by a usurper, Leudegast, prince of the Wiltau, seeks refuge 
in a forest together with an only daughter Sidea. In the forest the exile 
is attended by a demon, Runcival, who is of Ariel's kindred. The 
forest, although difficult of access, is by no means uninhabited. Mean- 
while the exile works his magic spell on his enemy's son Engelbrecht and 
makes him his prisoner in the sylvan retreat. The captive is forced by 
his master to bear logs, like Ferdinand in The Tempest. Finally the 
youth marries the girl, and the marriage reconciles the parents. At 
many points the stories of the German and English plays correspond. 
But there are too many discrepancies to establish a theory of direct 
dependence on Shakespeare's part. 



428 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

lowed an identical piece of fiction, which has not been 
quite precisely identified. 

In no earlier presentment of the magician's and his 
daughter's romantic adventures, is any hint given either 
The ship- of the shipwreck or of Caliban. Suggestions 
wreck. fQj. thcsc episodcs reached Shakespeare from a 
quarter nearer home than Spain or Germany. In the 
summer of 1609 a fleet bound for the new plantation of 
Jamestown in Virginia, under the command of Sir George 
Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, 
and the admiral's ship, .the 'Sea- Venture,' was driven 
on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles. 
There they remained ten months, pleasurably impressed 
by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried by 
the hogs which overran the island and by mysterious 
noises which led them to imagine that spirits and devils 
had made the island their home. Somers and his men 
were given up for lost, but they escaped from Bermuda in 
two boats of cedar to Virginia in May 16 10, and the 
news of their adventures and of their safety was carried 
to England by some of the seamen in September 1610. 
The sailors' arrival created vast public excitement in 
London. At least five accounts were soon published of 
the shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously 
uninhabited by man, which had proved the salvation of 
the expedition. 'A Discovery of the Bermudas, other- 
wise called the Isle of Divels,' written by Sylvester 
Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as 
early as October. A second pamphlet describing the 
disaster was issued by the Council of the Virginia Com- 
pany in December, and a third by one of the leaders of 
the expedition. Sir Thomas Gates. Shakespeare, who 
mentions the 'still vexed Bermoothes' (i. i. 229), incor- 
porated in 'The Tempest' many hints from Jourdain, 
Gates, and the other pamphleteers. The references to 
the gentle climate of the island on which Prospero is 
cast away, and to the spirits and devils that infested it, 
seem to render unquestionable its identification with 



THE LATEST PLAYS 429 

the newly discovered Bermudas. There is no reasonable 
ground for disputing that the catastrophe around which 
the plot of 'The Tempest' revolves was suggested by 
the casting away, in a terrific storm, on the rocky Atlan- 
tic coast, of the ship bound in 1609 for the new settle- 
ment of Jamestown. Prospero's uninhabited island re- 
flects most of the features which the shipwrecked sailors 
on this Virginian voyage assigned to their involuntary 
asylum, where they imagined themselves to be brought 
face to face with the elementary forces of Nature. 

The scene of the sailors' illusion stirred in the drama- 
tist's fertile imagination the further ambition to portray 
aboriginal man in his own home. But before ^^le si^-nif- 
he formulated his conception of Caliban, Shake- icance'of 
speare played parenthetically with current ^* ^^' 
fancies respecting the regeneration which the New World 
held in store for the Old. The French essayist Mon- 
taigne had fathered the notion that aboriginal America 
offered Europe an example of Utopian communism. In 
his rambling essay on cannibals (11. 30) he described an 
unknown island of the New World where the inhabitants 
lived according to nature and were innocent alike of the 
vices and virtues of civilisation. In 'The Tempest' 
(11. i. 154 seq.), Gonzalo, the honest counsellor of Naples, 
sketches after he and his companions are rescued from 
shipwreck the kind of natural law which, if the planta- 
tion were left in his hands, he would establish on the 
desert island of their redemption. Here Shakespeare 
hterally adopts Montaigne's vocabulary with its abrupt 
turns as it figured in Florio's English translation of 
the Frenchman's essays. But Shakespeare admits no 
personal faith in Montaigne's complaisant theorising, of 
which he takes leave with the comment that it is ' merry 
fooling.' 

Caliban was Shakespeare's ultimate conception of the 
true quality of aboriginal character. Specimens of the 
American Indian had been brought to England by Eliza- 
bethan or Jacobean voyagers during Shakespeare's work- 



430 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ing career. They had often been exhibited in London and 
Shake- the provinces by professional showmen as mir- 
speare and aculous monsters.^ Travellers had spoken and 
ican written freely of the native American. Caliban 

native. jg g^j^ imaginary composite portrait, an attempt 
to reduce to one common denominator the aboriginal types 
whom the dramatist had seen or of whom he had heard 
or read.^ Shakespeare's American proves to have little 
in common with the Arcadian innocent with which Mon- 
taigne identifies him. Shakespeare had lightly applied 
to savage man the words ' a very land-fish, languageless, 
a monster,' before he concentrated his attention on the 
theme.^ But on closer study he rejected this description, 
and finally presented him as a being endowed with five 
senses and appetites, with aptitudes for mechanical 
labour, with some knowledge and some control of the 
resources of inanimate nature and of the animal world. 
But his life was passed in that stage of evolutionary de- 
velopment which preceded the birth of moral sentiment, 
of intellectual perception, and of social culture. CaHban 
was a creature stumbHng over the first stepping-stones 
which lead from savagery to civiHsation.^ 

^ A native of New England called Epenew was brought to England 
in 1611, and 'being a man of so great a stature' was 'showed up and 
down London for money as a monster' (Capt. John Smith's Historie 
of New England, ed. 1907, ii. 7). The Porter in Henry VIII (v. iv. 32) 
doubtless had Epenew in mind when he alludes to the London mob's 
rush after 'some strange Indian.' When Trinculo in The Tempest 
speaks of the eagerness of a London crowd to pay for a sight of 'a dead 
Indian' (11. ii. 34) Shakespeare doubtless rec9.11s an actual experience. 
'Indian' is used by Shakespeare in the sense of 'Red Indian.' 

2 Traits of the normal tractable type of Indian to which belonged 
the Virginian and Caribbean of the middle continent mingle in Caliban 
with those of the irredeemable savages of Patagonia to the extreme 
south of America. To the former type Red Indian visitors to England 
belonged. The evidence which justifies the description of Caliban as a 
composite portrait of varied t3^es of the American Indian has been 
brought together by the present writer in two essays, 'The American 
Indian in Elizabethan England,' in Scribner's Magazine, September 1907, 
and ' Caliban's Visits to England,' in Cornhill Magazine, March 1913. 

^ Troilus and Cressida, iii. iii. 264. 

4 At some points Shakespeare reproduced in The Tempest with ab- 
solute literalness the experience of Europeans in their encounters with 



THE LATEST PLAYS 43 1 

The dramatist's notice of the god Setebos, the chief 
object of CaHban's worship, echoes accounts of the wild 
people of Patagonia, who lived in a state of Caliban's 
unqualified savagery. Pigafetta, an Italian god 
mariner, first put into writing an account of ^^^ °^' 
the Patagonians' barbarous modes of life and their un- 
couth superstitions. His tract circulated widely in 
Shakespeare's day in English translations, chiefly in 
Richard Eden's 'History of Travel' (1577). During the 
dramatist's Hfetime curiosity about the mysterious 
people spread. Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Caven- 
dish, in their circumnavigations of the globe, both paused 
on Patagonian territory and held intercourse with its 
strange inhabitants. In 'their great devil Setebos' 
centred the most primitive conceptions of religion. Cali- 
ban acknowledges himself to be a votary of 'the Pata- 
gonian devil.' Twice he makes mention of 'my dam's 
god Setebos' (i. ii. 373 ; v. i. 261). 

In one respect Shakespeare departs from his authorities. 

aboriginal inhabitants of newly discovered America. The savage's in- 
sistent recognition in the brutish Trinculo of divine attributes is a vivid 
and somewhat ironical picture of the welcome accorded to Spanish, 
French, and English explorers on their landing in the New World. 
Every explorer shared, too, Prospero's pity for the aborigines' inability 
to make themselves intelligible in their crabbed agglutinative dialects, 
and offered them instruction in civilised speech. The menial services 
which Caliban renders his civilised master specifically identify Prospero 
and his native servant with the history of early settlements of English- 
men in Virginia. 'I'U fish for thee,' Caliban tells Trinculo, and as soon 
as he believes that he has shaken off Prospero's tyrannical yoke he 
sings with exultant emphasis, 'No more dams I'll make for fish.' These 
remarks of Caliban are graphic echoes of a peculiar experience of Eliza- 
bethans in America. One of the chief anxieties of the early English 
settlers in Virginia was lest the natives should fail them in keeping in 
good order the fish-dams, where fish was caught for food by means of 
a device of great ingenuity. When Raleigh's first governor of Virginia, 
Ralph Lane, detected in 1586 signs of hostility among the natives about 
his camp, his thoughts at once turned to the dams or weirs. Unless the 
aborigines kept them in good order, starvation was a certain fate of the 
colonists, for no Englishmen knew how to construct and work these 
fish-dams on which the settlement relied for its chief sustenance. (Cf. 
Hakluyt's Voyages, ed. 1904, viii. 334 seq.) Caliban's threat to make 
'no more dams for fish' exposed Prospero to a very real and familiar 
peril. 



432 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Although untrustworthy rumours described aboriginal 
tribes in unexplored forests about the river Amazon 
as hideously distorted dwarfs,^ the average Indian of 
Caliban's America — even the Patagonian — was physi- 
distorted cally as wcll formed and of much the same stat- 
^ ^^^' ure as Englishmen, Yet CaHban is described 
as of ' disproportioned ' body ; he is likened to a tortoise, 
and is denounced as a ' freckled whelp ' or a ' poor credu- 
lous monster.' Such misrepresentation is no doubt 
deliberate. Caliban's distorted form brings into bolder 
relief his moral shortcomings, and more clearly defines 
his psychological significance. Elizabethan poetry com- 
pletely assimilated the Platonic idea, that the soul de- 
termines the form of the body. Shakespeare invested 
his 'rude and savage man of Ind' with a shape akin to 
his stunted intelligence and sentiment.^ 

King James I and his circle now looked to Shakespeare 
for most of their dramatic recreation. 'The Tempest,' 
'The penned in the spring of 1611, opened the 

Tempest' gay winter season at Court of 161 1-2, and 
at ourt. ^YiQ twelve pieces which followed it included 
among them Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale.' 'The Tem- 
pest' was again performed in February 161 2-3 during the 
festivities which celebrated the marriage of King James's 
daughter, Princess Elizabeth, with Frederick the Elector 
Palatine. Princess Elizabeth was, like Miranda, an 
island princess; but there was no relevance in the plot 
to the circumstances of the royal bridal.^ Eighteen 

^ Cf. Othello's reference to the Anthropophagi and men whose heads 
'Do grow beneath their shoulders' (i. iii. 144-5). Raleigh, in his Dis- 
coverie of Guiana, 1596, mentions on hearsay such a deformed race in a 
region of South America. 

^ Cf. Browning, Caliban upon Setebos, Daniel Wilson, Caliban, or the 
Missing Link [1873], and Renan, Caliban [1878], a drama continuing 
Shakespeare's play. 

^ A baseless theory, first suggested by Tieck, represents The Tempest 
as a masque written to celebrate Princess Elizabeth's marriage on Febru- 
ary 14, 161 2-13. It was clearly written some two years earlier. On 
any showing, the plot of The Tempest which revolves about the forcible 
expulsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter's wooing by 
the son of the usurper's chief ally, was hardly one that a shrewd play- 



THE LATEST PLAYS 433 

other plays at Court were given in honour of the nup- 
tials by Shakespeare's company under the direction of 
its manager, John Heminges. Five pieces besides 'The 
Tempest' in the extended programme were by Shake- 
speare, viz.:. 'The Winter's Tale,' 'Much Ado about 
Nothing,' 'Sir John Falstaff' (i.e. Henry IV'), 'Othello,' 
and 'Julius Caesar.' Two of these plays, 'Much Ado' 
and 'Henry IV,' were rendered twice.^ 

The early representations of 'The Tempest' evoked 
as much applause in the public theatre as at Court. The 
popular success of the piece owed something The vogue 
to the beautiful lyrics which were dispersed of the play. 
through the play and were set to music by Robert 
Johnson, a lutenist in high repute.^ Like its predecessor 
'The Winter's Tale,' 'The Tempest' long maintained its 
first success on the stage, and the vogue of the two pieces 
drew a passing sneer from Ben Jonson. In the Induc- 
tion to his 'Bartholomew Fair,' first acted in 1614, he 
wrote : ' If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, 
who can help it? he [i.e. the author] says, nor a nest of 
Antics. He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays 
like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like 
Drolleries.' The 'servant-monster' was an obvious allu- 
sion to CaUban, and ' the nest of Antics ' was a glance at 
the satyrs who figure in the sheep-shearing feast in ' The 
Winter's Tale.' 

Nowhere did Shakespeare give rein to his imagination 
with more imposing effect than in 'The Tempest.' The 
serious atmosphere has led critics, without much reason, 

Wright would deliberately choose as the setting of an official epithalamium 
in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about his title to the 
crown as James I. 

1 Heminges was paid on May 20, 1613, the total sum of 153^. 6^. 8d. 
for the company's elaborate services. See the accounts of Lord Stan- 
hope, Treasurer of the Chamber, in the Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. 
A 239 (f. 47), printed in Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines, ii. 87, and in the 
New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1885-6 ; ii. p. 419. 

2 Harmonised scores of Johnson's airs for the songs ' Full Fathom 
Five' and 'Where the Bee sucks' are preserved in Wilson's Cheerful 
Ayres or Ballads set for three voices, 1660. 



434 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

to detect in the scheme of the drama a philosophic 
pronouncement rather than a play of mature poetic 
Fanciful faucy. Little reliance should be placed on in- 
interpre- tcrprctatious wMch detach the play from its 
of 'The historic environment. The creation of Miranda 
Tempest.' jg the apotheosis in literature of tender, ingen- 
uous girlhood unsophisticated by social intercourse ; but 
Shakespeare had already sketched the outlines of the 
portrait in Marina and Perdita, the youthful heroines 
respectively of 'Pericles' and 'The Winter's Tale,' and 
these two characters were directly developed from ro- 
mantic stories of girl-princesses, cast by misfortune on 
the mercies of Nature, to which Shakespeare had re- 
course for the plots of the two plays. It is by accident, 
rather than design, that in Ariel appear to be discernible 
the capabilities of human intellect when relieved of 
physical attributes. Ariel belongs to the same poetic 
world as Puck, although he is delineated in the severer 
colours that were habitual to Shakespeare's fully devel- 
oped art. Caliban, as we have seen, is an imaginary 
portrait, conceived with matchless vigour and vividness, 
of the aboriginal savage of the New World, descriptions of 
whom abounded in contemporary travellers' speech and 
writings, while a few living specimens, who visited Shake- 
speare's England, excited the liveliest popular curiosity. 
In Prospero, the guiding providence of the romance, who 
resigns his magic power in the closing scene, traces have 
been sought of the lineaments of the dramatist himself, 
who was approaching in this play the date of his 
farewell to the enchanted work of his life, although 
he was not yet to abandon it altogether. Prospero 
is in the story a scholar-prince of rare intellectual 
attainments, whose engrossing study of the mysteries 
of science has given him magical command of the 
forces of Nature. His magnanimous renunciation of 
his magical faculty as soon as by its exercise he has 
restored his shattered fortunes is in accord with the 
general conception of a just and philosophical tem- 



THE LATEST PLAYS 435 

perament. Any other justification of his final act is 
superfluous.^ 

While there is every indication that in 161 1 Shake- 
speare surrendered the regular habit of dramatic com- 
position, it has been urged with much plausi- shake- 
bility that he subsequently drafted more than speare's 
one play which he suffered others to complete, with'john 
As his literary activity declined, his place at the Fletcher. 
head of the professional dramatists came to be filled by 
John Fletcher, who in partnership with Francis Beau- 
mont had from 1607 onwards been winning much 
applause from playgoers and critics. Beaumont's co- 
operation with Fletcher was shortlived, and ceased in 
Httle more than six years. Thereupon Fletcher found a 
new coadjutor in Philip Massinger, another competent 
playwright already enjoying some reputation, and 
Fletcher, with occasional aid from Massinger, has been 
credited on grounds of varying substance with complet- 
ing some dramatic work which engaged Shakespeare's 
attention on the eve of his retirement. Three plays, 
'Cardenio,' 'The Two Noble Kinsmen,' and 'Henry 
VIII,' have been named as the fruits of Shakespeare's 
farewell co-operation with Fletcher. The evidence in 
the first case is too slender to admit of a conclusion. In 
the case of the second piece the allegation of Shake- 
speare's partnership with Fletcher hangs in the balance 
of debate. Only in the third case of 'Henry VIII' 
may Fletcher's association with Shakespeare be accepted 
without demur. 

On Septemberg, 1653, the publisher Humphrey Moseley 
obtained a license for the publication of a play rj,^^ j^^^ 
which he described as 'History of Cardenio, play of 
by Fletcher and Shakespeare.' No drama of ^^ ^^^°' 
the name survives, but it was probably identical with 

1 A full discussion of all the points connected with The Tempest 
was contributed by the present writer to the beautifully printed edition, 
privately issued under the editorship of Willis Vickery, by the Rowfant 
Club, Cleveland, Ohio, in 191 1. 



436 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the lost piece called 'Cardenno/ or 'Cardenna,' which 
was twice acted at Court by Shakespeare's company in 
1613 — in May during the Princess EHzabeth's marriage 
festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy's 
ambassador.^ Moseley failed to pubhsh the piece, and 
no tangible trace of it remains to confirm or to confute 
his description of its authorship, which may be merely 
fanciful.^ The title of the play leaves no doubt that it 
was a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn 
Cardenio which are related in the first part of 'Don 
Quixote' (ch. xxiii.-xxxvii.). Cervantes's amorous story 
first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton's transla- 
tion of 'Don Quixote' in 161 2, There is no evidence of 
Shakespeare's acquaintance with Cervantes's great work. 
On the other hand Beaumont and Fletcher's farce of 
'The Knight of the Burning Pestle' echoes the mock 
heroics of the Spanish romance ; the adventures of 
Cervantes' 'Cardenio' offer much incident in Fletcher's 
vein, and he subsequently found more than one plot 
in Cervantes' 'Exemplary Novels.' The allegations 
touching the lost play of ' Cardenio ' had a curious sequel. 
In 1727 Lewis Theobald, the Shakespearean critic, 
induced the managers of Drury Lane Theatre to stage 
a piece called 'Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers,' 
on his mysterious representation that it was an un- 
published play by Shakespeare. The story of Theo- 
bald's piece is the story of Cardenio, although the char- 
acters are renamed. When Theobald pubhshed ' Double 
Falshood' next year he described it on the title-page as 
'written originally by W. Shakespeare, and now revised 
and adapted to the stage by Mr. Theobald.' Despite 
Theobald's warm protestations to the contrary,^ there is 
nothing in the play as published by him to suggest Shake- 

^ Treasurer's accounts in Rawl. MS. A 239, leaf 47 (in the Bodleian), 
printed in New Shakspere Soc.'s Transactions, 1895-6, pt. ii. p. 419. 

^ For Moseley's assignment to Shakespeare of plays of doubtful 
authorship, see p. 263 supra. 

^ In the ' preface of the editor ' Theobald wrote : ' It has been alleg'd 
as incredible, that such a Curiosity should be stifled and lost to the World 



THE LATEST PLAYS 437 

speare's hand. Theobald clearly took mystifying ad- 
vantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher 
had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme. ^ 

The two other pieces, 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' and 
'Henry VIII,' which have been attributed to a similar 
partnership, survive.^ 'The Two Noble Kins- .^^^ 
men' was first printed in 1634, and was, accord- Noble 
ing to the title-page, not only 'presented at the ^'^^™^^- 
Black-friers by the Kings Maiesties servants with great 
applause,' but was 'written by the memorable worthies 
of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shake- 
speare, gentlemen.' Neither author was alive at the date 
of the publication. Shakespeare had died in 16 16 and 
Fletcher nine years later. The piece was not admitted to 
any early edition of Shakespeare's collected works, but 
it was included in the second foHo of Beaumont and 
Fletcher of 1679. Critics of repute affirm and deny 
with equal confidence the joint authorship of the piece, 
which the original title-page announced. 

for above a Century. To This my Answer is short ; that tho' it never 
till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript 
Copies, which I have, is of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Hand- 
writing of Mr. Downes, the famous Old Prompter ; and, as I am credibly 
inform'd, was early in the Possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton, 
and by Him design'd to have been usher'd into the World. What 
Accident prevented This Purpose of his, I do not pretend to know : Or 
thro' what hands it had successively pass'd before that Period of Time. 
There is a Tradition (which I have from the Noble Person, who supply'd 
me with One of my Copies) that it was given by our Author, as a Present 
of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in 
the Time of his Retirement from the Stage. Two other Copies I have, 
(one of which I was glad to purchase at a very good Rate), which may 
not, perhaps, be quite so old as the Former ; but One of Them is much 
more perfect, and has fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense. . . . 
Others again, to depreciate the Affair, as they thought, have been pleased 
to urge, that tho' the Play may have some Resemblances of Shakespeare, 
yet the Colouring, Diction, and Characters come nearer to the Style and 
Manner of Fletcher. This, I think, is far from deserving any Answer.' 

^ Dr. Farmer thought he detected trace of Shirley's workmanship, 
and Malone that of Massinger. The piece was possibly Theobald's un- 
aided invention, and his claim for Shakespeare an ironical mystification. 

^ The 1634 quarto of the play was carefully edited for the New Shak- 
spere Society by Mr. Harold Littledale in 1876. See also William Spald- 
ing, Shakespeare's Authorship of 'Two Noble Kinsmen,' 1833, reprinted 
by New Shakspere Society, 1876. 



438 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The main plot is drawn directly from Chaucer's 

' Knight's Tale ' of Palamon and Arcite in which the two 

knightly friends, while suffering captivity at 

e p o . 'pi^^gseus's heroic hands, become estranged owing 
to their both falling in love with the same lady Emilia. 
After much chivalric adventure Arcite dies, and Palamon 
and EmiHa are united in marriage. The rather unsat- 
isfying story had been already twice dramatised ; but 
neither of the earlier versions has survived. Richard 
Edwardes (the father of 'tragicall comedy') was respon- 
sible for a lost play 'Palemon and Arcyte' which was 
acted before Queen Elizabeth at Christ Church on her 
visit to Oxford in 1566 ^ ; while at the Newington theatre 
Philip Henslowe produced as a new piece a second play 
of like name, 'Palamon and Arsett,' on September 17, 
1594. Henslowe thrice repeated the performance in the 
two following months.^ The obvious signs of indebted- 
ness on the part of Fletcher and his coadjutor to Chau- 
cer's narrative render needless any speculation whether 
or no the previous dramas were laid under contribution. 
With the Chaucerian tale the authors of 'The Two 
Noble Kinsmen' combine a trivial by-plot of crude 
workmanship in which 'the jailer's daughter' develops 
for Palamon a desperate and unrequited passion which 
engenders insanity. A mention of 'the play Palemon' 
in Ben Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair,' which was pro- 
duced in 1 6 14, suggests the date of the composition 
which is attributed to Shakespeare's and Fletcher's dual 
authorship. 

On grounds aUke of aesthetic criticism and metrical 
tests, a substantial portion of the main scenes of 'The 
Two Noble Kinsmen' was assigned to Shakespeare by 
judges of the acumen of Charles Lamb, Coleridge, De 
Quincey, and Swinburne. The Shakespearean editor 
Dyce included the whole piece in his edition of Shake- 
speare. Coleridge positively detected Shakespeare's hand 

^ Nichols's Progresses of Elizabeth, 1823, i. 210-3. 
2 Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 168. 



THE LATEST PLAYS 439 

in act I., act 11. sc. i., and act in. sc. i. and ii. In addition 
to those scenes, act iv. sc. iii. and act v. (except sc. ii.) 
have been subsequently placed to his credit by critics 
whose judgment merits respect. It is undeni- 
able that two different styles figure in the piece, specie's 
The longer and inferior part, including the l^^f^"^ 
subsidiary episode of 'the jailer's daughter,' 
may be allotted to Fletcher's pen without misgiv- 
ing, but in spite of the weight attaching to the ver- 
dict of the afhrmative critics, some doubt is inevi- 
table as to whether the smaller and superior portion 
of the drama is Shakespeare's handiwork. The lan- 
guage of the disputed scenes often recalls Shakespeare's 
latest efforts. The opening song, 'Roses their sharp 
spines being gone,' echoes Shakespeare's note so closely 
that it is difficult to allot it to another. Yet the char- 
acterisation falls throughout below the standard of the 
splendid diction. The personages either lack distinc- 
tiveness of moral feature or they breathe a sordid senti- 
ment which rings falsely. It may be that Shakespeare 
was content to redraft in his own manner speeches which 
Fletcher had already infected with unworthy traits of 
feeling. On the other hand, it is just possible that Philip 
Massinger, Fletcher's fellow-worker, who is known else- 
where to have echoed Shakespeare's tones with almost 
magical success, may be responsible for the contribu- 
tions to ' The Two Noble Kinsmen ' to which Fletcher has 
no claim. Massinger's ethical temper is indistinguishable 
from that which pervades 'The Two Noble Kinsmen.' 
There may be nothing in Massinger's extant work quite 
equal to the style of the non-Fletcherian scenes there, 
but it is easier to believe that some exceptional impulse 
should have lifted Massinger for once to their level, 
than that Shakespeare should have belied on a single 
occasion his habitual ideals of ethical principle. 

The literary problems presented by the play of ' Henry 
VIII' closely resemble those attaching to 'The Two 
Noble Kinsmen.' Shakespeare had abandoned the theme 



440 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of English history with his drama of ' Henry V ' early 
in 1599. Public interest in the English historical play 
'Henry thenceforth steadily declined ; fresh experiments 
VIII.' were rare and occasional, and when they were 

made, they usually dealt with more recent periods of 
English history than were sanctioned at earlier epochs. 

The reign of Henry VIII attracted much attention 
from dramatists when the historical mode of drama was 
Previous ending its career. Shakespeare's company 
plays on produccd, whcn the sixteenth century was 
the topic, closing, two plays dealing respectively with the 
lives of Henry VIII's statesmen, Thomas Cromwell and 
Sir Thomas More. But though King Henry is the pivot 
of both plots, he does not figure in the dramatis personce} 
In 1605, an obscure dramatist, Samuel Rowley, ventured 
for the first time to bring Henry VIII on the stage as the 
hero of a chronicle-play or history-drama. The drama- 
tist worked on crude old fashioned lines which recall 
'The Famous Victories of Henry V.' The piece, which 
was performed by Prince Henry's company of players, 
bore the strange title 'When you see me you know me. 
Or the famous Chronicle Historic of King Henrie the 
Eight, With the Birth and vertuous Life of Edward 
Prince of Wales.' ^ 

^ Thomas Lord Cromwell, which was pubUshed in 1602, was falsely 
ascribed to Shakespeare. Sir Thomas More, which was not printed till 
1844, is extant in Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 7368, and has been carefully 
edited for the Malone society, 191 1. The Admiral's company under 
Henslowe's management produced in 1601 and 1602 two (lost) plays 
concerning Cardinal Wolsey, the first one called The Life, the other 
The Rising of the Cardinal. Henry Chettle would seem to have been 
the author of the Life and to have revised the Rising, which was from 
the pens of Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Wentworth Smith 
(Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 218). 

2 The main themes are the birth of Prince Edward, afterwards Edward 
VI, the death of his mother. Queen Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's fifth 
wife, and the plots against the life of her successor. Queen Catherine 
Parr. The career of Cardinal Wolsey, who died long before Edward VI 
was heard of, is prolonged by the playwright, so that he plays a sub- 
ordinate part in the drama. The King, Henry VIII, is the chief per- 
sonage, and he appears at full length as bluff King Harry capable of 
terrifying outbursts of wrath and of almost as terrifying outbursts of 
merriment. The King finds recreation in the companionship of his 



THE LATEST PLAYS 44 1 

The prologue to the Shakespearean 'Henry VIII' 
warned the audience that the King's reign was to be 
treated on Knes differing from those followed 'aihs 
in Rowley's preceding effort. The play was ^^^^■' 
not to be a piece of 'fool and fight,' with Henry VIII 
engaging his jester in undignified buffoonery. There 
were to be noble scenes such as draw the eye to flow 
and the incident was to justify the alternative title of 
the piece, 'All is True.' ^ 

The Shakespearean drama followed Holinshed with 
exceptional closeness. Nowhere was Holinshed's work 
better done than in his account of the early jjoiju. 
part of Henry VIII's reign, where he utilised shed's 
the unpubhshed 'Life of Wolsey' by his ^*°'^^' 
gentleman usher, George Cavendish, a good specimen of 
sympathetic biography. One of the finest speeches in 
the Shakespearean play. Queen Katharine's opening 
appeal on her trial, is in great part the chronicler's 
prose rendered into blank verse, without 
change of a word. Despite the debt to Holin- tive de- 
shed's Chronicle the play of 'Henry VIII' {l^^yi^y 
shows a greater want of coherence and a bolder 
conflict with historical chronology than are to be met 
with in Shakespeare's earlier ' histories.' It is more loosely 
knit than 'Henry V,' which in design it resembles most 
closely.^ The King, Henry VIII, is a moving force 

fool or jester, an historic personage Will Summers. Will Summers 
has a comic foil in Patch, the fool or jester of Cardinal Wolsey. The 
two fools engage in many comic encounters. The King, in emulation 
of Prince Hal's (Henry V's) exploits, wanders in disguise about the 
purlieus of London in search of adventure. In the same year (1605) as 
When you see me you know me appeared, there came out a spectacular 
and rambling presentation of Queen Elizabeth's early life and coronation 
with a sequel celebrating the activity of London merchants and the 
foundation of the Royal Exchange. This piece of pageantry was from 
the industrious pen of Thomas Heywood, and bore the cognate title 
// you know not me, you know nobody. 

^ Cf. Prologue, 1-7, 13-27, where the spectators are advised that 
they may 'here find truth.' The piece is described as 'our chosen 
truth' and as solely confined to what is true. See p. 445 infra. 

2 The deaths of Queen Katharine (in 1536) and Cardinal Wolsey 
(in 1530) are represented as taking place at the same time, whereas 



442 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

throughout the play. He is no very subtle portrait, 
being for the most part King Hal of popular tradition, 
imperious and autocratic, impulsive and sensual, and 
at the same time both generous and selfish. But 
Queen Katharine, a touching portrait of matronly dig- 
nity and resignation, is the heroine of the drama, and her 
withdrawal comparatively early in its progress produces 
the impression of an anticlimax. The midway fall of 
Wolsey also disturbs the constructive balance; the 
arrogant statesman who has worked his way up from 
the ranks shows a self-confidence which his sudden peril 
renders pathetic, and the heroic dignity with which he 
meets his change of fortune prejudices the dramatic 
interest of the tamer incidents following his death. 
Anne Boleyn, who succeeds Queen Katharine as King 
Henry's wife, is no very convincing sketch of frivolity 
and coquettishness. Her confidante, the frank old 
lady, clearly reflected Shakespeare's alert intuition, but 
the character's conventional worldliness is far from 
pleasing. At the end of 'Henry VIII' a new and in- 
artistic note is struck without warning in the eulogy of 
Queen Anne's daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, and in 
the complimentary reference to her successor on the 
EngHsh throne, King James, the patron of the theatre.^ 
The play was produced at the Globe theatre early in 
1 613. The theory that it was hastily completed for the 
The scenic special purposc of enabling the company to cele- 
eiabora- bratc the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the 
*^°°' Elector Palatine, which took place on February 

14, 1612-13, seems fanciful. During the succeeding 

Queen Katharine survived the Cardinal by six years. Cranmer's prose- 
cution by his foes of the Council precedes in the play Queen Elizabeth's 
christening (on September 10, 1533), whereas the archbishop's difficulties 
arose eleven years later (in 1 544) . 

^ Throughout, the development of events is interrupted by five barely 
relevant pageants : (i) the entertainment provided for Henry VIII and 
Anne Boleyn by Cardinal Wolsey; (2) the elaborate embellishment of 
the trial scene of Queen Katharine ; (3) the coronation of Anne Boleyn ; 
(4) a vision acted in dumb show in Queen Katharine's djdng moments; 
and (5) the christening procession of the Princess Elizabeth. 



THE LATEST PLAYS 443 

weeks, nineteen plays, according to an extant list, were 
produced at Court in honour of the event, but 'Henry 
VIII ' was not among them. According to contemporary 
evidence the piece 'was set forth [at the Globe] with 
many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and 
Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage ; the Knights 
of the Order, with their Geprges and Garters, the guards 
with their embroidered Coats, and the like : sufficient 
in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, 
if not ridiculous.' ^ Salvoes of artillery saluted the 
King's entry in one of the scenes. The scenic elabora- 
tion well indicated the direction which the organisa- 
tion of the stage was taking in Shakespeare's last days. 
' Henry VIII ' was not published in Shakespeare's life- 
time. But when the First Folio appeared in 1623, seven 
years after his death, the section of histories in that 
volume was closed by the piece called 'The Famous 
History of the Life of King Henry VIII.' Shakespeare 
was generally credited with the drama through the seven- 
teenth century, but in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury his sole responsibility was powerfully questioned 
on critical grounds.^ Dr. Johnson asserted ^j^ 
that the genius of Shakespeare comes in and divided 
goes out with Katharine. The rest of the piece ^"^horship. 
was not in his opinion above the powers of lesser men. 
No reader with an ear for metre can fail to detect in 
the piece two rhythms, an inferior and a superior rhythm. 
Two different pens were clearly at work. The greater 
part of the play must be assigned to the pen of a coad- 
jutor of Shakespeare, and considerations of metre and 
style identify his assistant beyond doubt with John 
Fletcher. It is quite possible that here and there 
Philip Massinger collaborated with Fletcher; but it is 
difficult to treat seriously the conjecture, despite the 
ability with which it has been pleaded, that Massinger 

^ Sir Henry Wotton in Reliquice WottoniancE, 1675, pp. 425-6. 
2 Cf . the notes by one ' Mr. Roderick ' in Edwards's Canons of Criti- 
cism, 1765, p. 263. 



444 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

was Fletcher's fellow-worker to the exclusion of Shake- 
speare.^ 

A metrical analysis of the piece leads to the conclu- 
sion that no more than six of the seventeen scenes of 
Shake- ^^^ P^^Y ^^^ ^e positively set to Shakespeare's 
speare's Credit. Shakcspcare's six unquestioned scenes 

share. ^^.^ . ^^^ ^ ^^ • ^^^ •• . ^^ — ^^^ -^ . ^^^ 

greater part of iii. ii., and v. i. Thus Shakespeare 
can claim the first entry of Buckingham; the scene in 
the council chamber in which that nobleman is charged 
with treason at the instigation of Wolsey ; the confiden- 
tial talk of Anne Boleyn with the worldly old lady, who 
is ambitious for her protegee's promotion; the trial 
scene of Queen Katharine which is the finest feature of 
the play; the greater part of the episode of Wolsey's 
fall from power, and the King's assurances of protection 
to Cranmer when he is menaced by the Catholic party. 
The metre and language of the Shakespearean scenes 
are as elliptical, irregular, and broken as in ' Coriolanus ' 
or 'The Tempest.' There is the same close-packed ex- 
pression, the same rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, 
the same impatient and impetuous activity of intellect 
and fancy. The imagery has the pointed, vivid, homely 
strength of Shakespeare's latest plays. Katharine and 
Hermione in 'The Winter's Tale' are clearly cast in 
the same mould, and the trial scene of the one invites 
comparison with that of the other. On the whole the 
palm must be given to Shakespeare's earlier effort. 

Some hesitation is inevitable in finally separating the 
non-Shakespearean from the Shakespearean elements of 
Woise 's ^^^ play. One may well hesitate to deprive 
farewell Shakespeare of the dying speeches of Bucking- 
speech. ^^^ ^^^ Quccu Katharine. There is a third 
famous passage about the authorship of which it is 
unwise to dogmatise. Probably no extract from the 
drama has been more often recited than Wolsey's 

^ Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 
1884. 



THE LATEST PLAYS 445 

dying colloquy with his servant Cromwell. Many 
trained ears detect in the Cardinal's accents a cadence 
foreign to Shakespeare's verse and identical with that 
of Fletcher ; yet it is equally apparent that in concentra- 
tion of thought and command of elevated sentiment 
these passages in ' Henry VIII ' reach a level above any- 
thing that Fletcher compassed elsewhere. They are 
comparable with the work of no dramatist save Shake- 
speare. Wolsey's valediction may be reckoned a fruit 
of Shakespeare's pen, though Shakespeare caught here 
his coadjutor's manner, adapting Fletcher's metrical 
formulae to his own great purpose. 

The play of 'Henry VIII' contains Shakespeare's 
last dramatic work, and its production was nearly asso- 
ciated with the final scene in the history of that The bum- 
theatre which was identified with the triumphs ingof the 

... -r^ • r f \-\ Globe, 

of his career. During a performance oi the june 29, 
piece while it was yet new, in the summer of ^^^3- 
1613 (on June 29) the Globe theatre was burnt to the 
ground. The outbreak began during the scene — ■ at 
the end of act i. — when Henry VIII arrives at Wolsey's 
house to take part in a fancy-dress ball given in the 
King's honour, and Henry has his fateful introduction 
to Anne Boleyn. According to the stage direction, the 
King was received with a salute of cannon. What 
followed on the fatal day, was thus described by a 
contemporary, who gives the piece its original name of 
'All is True, representing some principal pieces in the 
reign of Henry VIII.': 'Now King Henry making a 
Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's House, and certain 
Canons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or 
other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did 
Hght on the Thatch, where being thought at first but 
an idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, 
it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consum- 
ing within less than an hour the whole House to the very 
grounds. This was the fatal period of that vertuous 
fabrique; wherein yet nothing did perish, but wood 



446 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and straw and a few forsaken cloaks ; only one man had 
his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled 
him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put 
it out with bottle[d] ale.' ^ 

There is reason to beheve that in the demolished 
playhouse were many of the players' books, including 
Shakespeare's original manuscripts, which were the prop- 
erty of his theatrical company. Scattered copies sur- 
vived elsewhere in private hands, but the loss of the 
dramatist's autographs rendered incurable the many 
. textual defects of surviving transcripts.^ 

^ Sir Henry Wotton in Reliqida Wottoniance, pp. 425-6. John Cham- 
berlain, writing to Sir Ralph Winwood on July 8, 1613, briefly mentions 
that the theatre was burnt to the ground in less than two hours owing 
to the accidental ignition of the thatch roof through the firing of cannon 
' to be used in the play ' ; the audience escaped unhurt though they had 
'but two narrow doors to get out' (Win wood's Memorials, iii. p. 469). 
A similar account was sent by the Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas 
Puckering, Bart., from London, June 30, 1613. 'The fire broke out,' 
Lorkin wrote, 'no longer since than yesterday, while Burbage's company 
were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII' {Court and Times of 
James I, 1848, vol. i. p. 253). On June 30, 1613, the Stationers' Company 
licensed the publication of two separate ballads on the disaster, one called 
The Sodayne Burninge of the ' Globe ' on the Baiikside in the Play tyme on 
Saint Peters day last, 16 13, and the other A doleful ballad of the generall 
ouerthroive of the famous theater on the Banksyde, called the 'Globe,' &c., by 
William Parrat. (Arber's Transcripts, iii. 528.) Neither of these pub- 
lications survives in print; but one of them may be identical with a 
series of stanzas on 'the pittifull burning of the Globe playhouse in 
London,' which Haslewood first printed 'from an old manuscript volume 
of poems' in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1816, and Halliwell-Phillipps 
again printed {Outlines, pp. 310, 311) from an authentic manuscript in 
the library of Sir Matthew Wilson, Bart., of Eshton Hall, Yorkshire. 
The perils of Shakespeare's close friends Burbage, Condell and Heminges 
are crudely described in the following lines : 

Some lost their hattes, and some their swordes, 
Then out runne Burbidge too, 
The Reprobates, though drunck on Munday, 
Prayed for the Foole and Henry Condye . . . 
Then with swolne eyes like druncken Fleminges 
Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges. 

^ When the Fortune theatre suffered the Globe's fate on Dec. 1621 and 
was burnt to the ground, John Chamberlain, the London gossip, wrote 
that the building was 'quite burnt downe in two houres, & all their 
apparell & playbookes lost, wherby those poor Companions are quite 
undone' {Court and Times of James I, ii. 280-1). It is unlikely that 



THE LATEST PLAYS 447 

Ben Jonson deplored Vulcan's 

Ben Jon- 
' mad prank son on 

Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank.' the 

disaster. 

He wrote how he saw the building 

'with two poor chambers [i.e. cannon] taken in [i.e. destroyed], 
And razed : ere thought could urge this might have been ! 
See the World's ruins ! nothing but the piles ! 
Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles.' ^ 

The owners of the playhouse, of which Shakespeare 
was one, did not rest on their oars in face of misfortune. 
The theatre was rebuilt next year on a more -phe re- 
elaborate scale than before. The large cost building of 
of 1,400/. more than doubled the original ^ ^ ° ^' 
outlay. The expenses were defrayed by the share- 
holders among themselves in proportion to their hold- 
ings. Shakespeare subscribed a sum slightly exceeding 
100/.^ The 'new playhouse' was re-opened on June 
30, 1614, and was then described as 'the fairest that 
ever was in England.' ^ But Shakespeare's career was 
nearing its end, and in the management of the new 
building he took no active part. If the second fabric 
of the ' Globe ' fell short of the fame of the first, its place 
of precedence among London playhouses was not quickly 
questioned. It survived till 1644, when the Civil Wars 
suppressed all theatrical enterprise in England. For 
at least twenty of the thirty years of its life the new 
Globe enjoyed a substantial measure of the old Globe's 
prosperity. 

Shakespeare and his company suffered better fortune on June 29, 1613. 
Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 65. 

^ Jonson's An Execration upon Vulcan in his Underwoods, Ixi. Jon- 
son's poem deplored the burning of his own library which took place a 
few years after the destruction of the Globe. 

2 See pp. 308-9 supra. 

^ John Chamberlain to Mrs. Alice Carlton, Court and Times of James I, 
1848, i. 329. 



XX 

THE CLOSE OF LIFE 

According to the Oxford antiquary John Aubrey, 
Shakespeare, through the period of his professional 
Retire- activities, paid an annual visit of unspecified 
Stratford, duration to Stratford-on-Avon. The greater 
1611. part of his working career was spent in London. 

But with the year 161 1, which saw the completion of 
his romantic drama of 'The Tempest,' Shakespeare's 
regular home would seem to have shifted for the rest of 
his life to his native place. ^ It is clear that after Strat- 
ford became his fixed abode he occasionally left the town 
for sojourns in London which at times lasted beyond a 
month. Proof, too, is at hand to show that the intima- 
cies which he had formed in the metropolis with pro- 
fessional associates continued till the end of his days. 
Yet there is no reason to question the veteran tradition 
that the five years which opened in 161 1 formed for the 
dramatist an epoch of comparative seclusion amid the 
scenes of his youth. We may accept without serious 
qualification the assurance of his earliest biographer 
Nicholas Rowe that 'the latter part of his [Shake- 
speare's] life was spent, as all men of good sense will 
wish theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the con- 
versation of his friends.' 

Shakespeare's withdrawal to Stratford did not pre- 
clude the maintenance of business relations with the 
London theatres where he won his literary triumphs 
and his financial prosperity. There is Httle doubt that 

^ 'He frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder 
days lived at Stratford.' — Diary of John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, 
p. 183. 

448 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 449 

he retained his shares in both the Globe and Black- 
friars theatres till his death. If after 1611 he . 
only played an intermittent part in the affairs interest in 
of the company who occupied those stages, he [jj°^^^^°gg 
was never unmindful of his personal interest 
in its fortunes. Plays from his pen were constantly 
revived at both theatres, and the demand for their per- 
formance at Court saw no abatement. In the early 
spring of 16 13 when the marriage of James's daughter, 
the Princess Ehzabeth, with the Elector Palatine was 
celebrated with an exceptionally generous rendering of 
stage plays, there were produced at Whitehall no fewer 
than six pieces of Shakespeare's undoubted authorship 
as well as the lost play of 'Cardenio,' for which he 
divided the credit with John Fletcher.^ 

According to an early tradition Shakespeare cherished 
through his later years some close social relations with 
Oxford, where to the last he was wont to break . 
his journey between Stratford and London, the Crown 
He invariably lodged at Oxford with John q^^*^^ 
Davenant, a prosperous vintner whose inn at 
Carfax in the parish of St. Martin's, subsequently 
known as the ' Crown,' was well patronised by residents 
as well as travellers. The innkeeper was credited by 
the Oxford antiquary Anthony a Wood with ' a melan- 
cholic disposition and was seldom or never seen to laugh,' 
yet he 'was an admirer and lover of plays and play- 
makers.' According to a poetic eulogist 

Hee had choyce giftes of Nature and of arte, 
Neither was fortune wanting on her parte 
To him in honours, wealth or progeny. 

Shakespeare is said to have delighted in the society of 
Davenant's wife, 'a very beautiful woman of a good wit 
and conversation,' and to have interested himself in 

^ See pp. 435, 436 supra. The King's company were again active at 
Court at the Christmas seasons of 1614-5 and 1615-6; but the names of 
the pieces then performed have not been recovered. See Cunningham's 
Revels, and E. K. Chambers in Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 165-6. 

2 G 



450 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

their large family. Much care was bestowed on the educa- 
tion of the five sons. Robert, who became a Fellow of 
St. John's College at Oxford and a doctor of divinity, 
was proud to recall in manhood how the dramatist ' had 
given him [when a boy] a hundred kisses.' 

The second son William gained much distinction as 
a poet and playwright in the middle of the seventeenth 
The Chris- century, and was knighted as a zealous royalist 
teningof in 1 643. He was baptised at St. Martin's, 
William Carfax, on March 3, 1605-6, and there is little 
D'Avenant. doubt that Shakcspcare was his godfather. 
The child was ten years old at the dramatist's death. 
The special affection which Shakespeare manifested 
for him subsequently led to a rumour that he was 
Shakespeare's natural son. Young Davenant, whose 
poetic ambitions rendered the allegation congenial, 
penned in his twelfth year 'an ode in remembrance of 
Master William Shakespeare,' and changed the spelling 
of his name from Davenant to D^Avensint in order to 
suggest a connection with the river Avon. The scandal 
rests on flimsy foundation ; but there is adequate evidence 
of the bond of friendly sympathy which subsisted be- 
tween Shakespeare and the Oxford innkeeper's family,^ 
and of the pleasant associations with the university 
city which the dramatist enjoyed at the close of life, 
when going to or returning from London, 

^ The innkeeper John Davenant died in 162 1 while he was Mayor of 
Oxford, a fortnight after the death of his wife. A verse elegy assigns 
his death to grief over her loss, and the pair are credited with an un- 
broken strength of mutual affection which seems to refute any imputa- 
tion on the lady's character. Another elegiac poem reckons among 
Davenant's sources of felicity 'a happy issue of a vertuous wife.' A 
popular anecdote, in which the Oxford antiquary Hearne and the poet 
Pope delighted, runs to the effect that the boy EJ'Avenant once 'meet- 
ing a grave doctor of divinity ' told him that he was about to ask a bless- 
ing of his godfather, Shakespeare, who had just come to the town, and 
that the doctor retorted 'Hold, child, you must not take the name of 
God in vain.' The jest is of ancient lineage, and was originally told of 
other persons than Shakespeare and D'Avenant (Halliwell-Phillipps, 
Outlines, ii. 43 seq.). In an elegy on D'Avenant in 1668 he is represented 
as being greeted in the Elysian Fields by ' his cousin Shakespeare ' (Huth's 
Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, 1584-1700, sheet S, 2 verso). 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 451 

Of Shakespeare's personal relations in his latest years 
with his actor colleagues, much interesting testimony 
survives. It was characteristic of the friendly Relations 
sympathy which he moved in his fellow- workers with actor 
that Augustine Phillips, an actor who was, Hke "^" ^' 
Shakespeare, one of the original shareholders of the Globe 
theatre, should on his premature death in May 1605 
have bequeathed by his will 'to my fellowe William 
Shakespeare a thirty shillings peece in gould.' ^ Of 
the members of the King's company who were longer- 
lived than Phillips and survived Shakespeare, the actors 
John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage 
chiefly enjoyed the dramatist's confidence in the season 
of his partial retirement. Heminges, the reputed creator 
of Falstaff, was the business manager or director of the 
company ; and Condell was, with the great actor Bur- 
bage, Heminges's chief partner in the practical organisa- 
tion of the company's concerns.^ All three were re- 
membered by the dramatist in his will, and after his 
death two of them, Heminges and Condell, not merely 

^ Phillips had been a resident in Southwark. But within a year of 
his death he purchased a house and land at Mortlake, where he died. 
See his will in Collier's Lives of the Actors, pp. 85-88. Phillips died in 
affluent circumstances and remembered many of his fellow-actors in his 
will, leaving to 'his fellow' Henry Condell and to his theatrical servant 
Christopher Beeston, like sums as to Shakespeare. He also bequeathed 
'twenty shillings in gould' to each of the actors Lawrence Fletcher, 
Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cook, Nicholas Tooley, to- 
gether with forty shillings and clothes or musical instruments to two 
theatrical apprentices Samuel Gilborne and James Sands. Five pounds 
were further to be equally distributed amongst 'the hired men of the 
company.' Of four executors three were the actors John Heminges, 
Richard Burbage, and William Sly, who each received a silver bowl 
of the value of five pounds. Phillips's share in the Globe theatre, 
which is not mentioned in his will, was identical with Shakespeare's 
and passed to his widow. See p. 305 supra. 

2 The latest recorded incident within Shakespeare's lifetime touching 
the business management of the company bears the date March 29, 1615, 
when Heminges and Burbage, as two leading members of the company, 
were summoned before the Privy Council to answer a charge of giv- 
ing performances during Lent. There is no entry in the Privy Council 
Register of the hearing of the accusation in which all the London com- 
panies were involved. The absence from the summons of Shakespeare's 
name is corroborative of his virtual retirement from active theatrical life. 



452 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

carried through the noble project of the first collected 
edition of his plays, but they bore open and signal 
tribute to their private affection for him in the ' Address 
Shake- ^^ ^^^ Reader' which they prefixed to the 
speareand Undertaking. The third of Shakespeare's life- 
^'^ ^^^' long professional friends, Richard Burbage, was 
by far the greatest actor of the epoch. It was he who 
created on the stage most of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, 
including Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. Contempo- 
rary witnesses attest the 'justice' with which Burbage 
rendered the dramatist's loftiest conceptions. It is 
beyond doubt that Shakespeare and Burbage cultivated 
the closest intimacy from the earhest days of their 
association. They were reputed to be companions in 
many sportive adventures. The sole anecdote of 
Shakespeare that is positively known to have been re- 
corded in his Hfetime relates that Burbage, when play- 
ing 'Richard III,' agreed with a lady in the audience to 
visit her after the performance; Shakespeare, over- 
hearing the conversation, anticipated the actor's visit, 
and met Burbage on his arrival at the lady's house 
with the quip that 'Wilham the Conqueror was before 
Richard the Third.' The credible chronicler of the 
story was the law student Manningham,^ who, near 
the same date, described an early performance of 
'Twelfth Night' in Middle Temple Hall. 

Other evidence shows that Burbage's relations with 
Shakespeare were not confined to their theatrical re- 
sponsibilities. In the dramatist's latest years, when he 
had settled in his native town, he engaged with the 
great actor in a venture with which the drama had small 
concern. The partnership illustrates a deferential 

_ 1 Manningham, Diary, March 13, 1601, Camden Soc, p. 39. The 
diarist's authority was his chamber-fellow 'Mr. Curie' (not 'Mr. Touse' 
as the name has been wrongly transcribed). The female patrons of 
the theatre in Shakespeare's time were commonly reckoned to be pe- 
culiarly susceptible to the actors' fascination. Cf. John Earle's Micro- 
cosmographie, 1628 (No. 22, 'A Player') : 'The waiting women spec- 
tators are over-eares in love with him, and ladies send for him to act in 
their Chambers.' 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 453 

readiness on the part of author and actor to obey the 
rather frivolous behests of an influential patron. 

Early in 16 13 Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, 
a nobleman of some literary pretension, invited Shake- 
speare and Burbage to join in devising, in 

r -^ -4.1. \. ui The Earl of 

conformity with a current vogue, an emble- Rutland's 
matic decoration for his equipment at a '^impresa,' 
great Court joust or tournament. Tourna- 
ments or jousts, which descended from days of mediaeval 
chivalry, still formed in James I.'s reign part of the cere- 
monial recreation of royalty, and throughout the era of 
the Renaissance poets and artists combined to ornament 
the jousters' shields with ingenious devices (known in 
Italy as 'imprese' and in France as 'devises') in which 
a miniature symbolic picture was epigrammatically 
interpreted by a motto or brief verse.^ The fantastic 

^ Literature on the subject of ' imprese ' abounded in Italy. The 
poet Tasso published a dialogue on the subject. The standard Italian 
works on 'imprese' are Luca Contile's Ragionamenti sopra la proprietd 
delle Imprese (1573) and Giovanni Ferro's Theatro d'linprese (Venice, 
1623). Among French poets, Clement Marot supplies in his (Euvres 
(ed. Jannet, Paris, 1868) many examples of poetic interpretation of 
pictorial 'devises'; see his Epigramme xxix. 'Sur la Devise: "Non 
ce que je pense"' (vol. iii. p. 15) ; Ixxv. 'Pour une dame qui donna une 
teste de mort en devise' {ib. p. 32) ; xciii. 'Pour une qui donna la devise 
d'un neud a un gentilhomme' {ib. p. 40). Etienne Jodelle was equally 
productive in the same kind of composition; cf. 'Recueil des inscrip- 
tions, figures, devises et masquarades ordonnees en I'hostel de ville de 
Paris, le Jeudi 17 de Fevrier 1558' in honour of Henri II. (in Jodelle's 
(Euwes, ed. Marty-Laveaux, Paris, 1868, vol. i. p. 237). Similarly 
Ronsard wrote mottoes for 'emblesmes' and 'devises'; cf. his (Eiivres, 
ed. Blanchemain, ' Pour un emblesme representant des saules esbranchez ' 
(iv. 203) and 'Au Roy, sur sa devise' (viii. 129). See too Jusserand's 
Literary History of the English People, 1909 (iii. 270). The fantastic 
exercise was also held in England to be worthy of the energy of eminent 
genius. Sir Philip Sidney was proud of his proficiency in the art. The 
poet Samuel Daniel translated an Italian treatise on 'imprese' with 
abundance of original illustration. English essays on the theme came 
from the pens of the scholarly antiquary, WUliam Camden, and of the 
Scottish poet, Drummond of Hawthornden. During Queen Elizabeth's 
and King James I.'s reigns a gallery at Whitehall was devoted to an 
exhibition of copies (on paper) of the 'imprese' emplo3^ed in contempo- 
rary tournaments (see Hentzner's Diary). Manningham, the Middle 
Temple student, gives in his Diary (pp. 3-5) descriptions of thirty-six 
'devises and impressaes' which he examined in 'the gallery at White- 



454 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

' impresa ' or literary pictorial device, which had obvious 
affinities with heraldry, was variously applied to the 
decoration of architectural work, of furniture or of cos- 
tume, but it was chiefly used in the blazonry of the shields 
in jousts or tournaments. It was with the object of 
enhancing the dignity of the Earl of Rutland's equip- 
ment at a spectacular tournament in which he and 
other courtiers engaged at Whitehall on March 24, 
161 2-3, that the great dramatist and the great actor 
exercised their ingenuity. Burbage was an accomplished 
painter as well as player, and he and Shakespeare de- 
vised for the Earl an 'impresa.' Shakespeare supplied 
the scheme with the interpreting 'word' or motto, 
while the actor executed the pictorial device.^ 

Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, in whose 
behalf Shakespeare thus amiably employed an idle hour. 
The sixth belonged to that cultivated section of the 
Earl of nobihty which patronised poetry and drama 
^^^^ ■ with consistent enthusiasm and generosity. 
The earl's fleeting association with the poet in 1613 
harmonises with Shakespeare's earlier social experience. 
The poet's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was Lord 
Rutland's friend and the friend of his family.^ He had 

hall 19 Martij 1601.' None show any brilliant invention. One of Man- 
ningham's descriptions runs : ' A palme tree laden with armor upon the 
bowes, the word Fero et patior.' 

^ In dramatic work for which his authorship was undivided, Shake- 
speare only once mentioned 'imprese.' In Richard II. (11. i. 25) such 
devices are mentioned as occasionally emblazoned in the stained glass 
windows of noblemen's houses. But in a scene descriptive of a tourna- 
ment in the play of Pericles (11. ii. 16 seq.), which must be assigned to 
Shakespeare's partner, six knights appear, each bearing on his shield an 
'impresa' the details of which are specified in the text. The fourth 
device, 'a burning torch that's turned upside down' with the motto 
'Quod me aht me extinguit,' is borrowed from Claude Paradin's Heroicall 
Devices, translated by P. S., 1591. A like scene of a tournament with 
description of the knights' 'imprese' figures in The Partiall Law (ed. 
Dobell, 1908), p. 19; the 'imprese' on the shields of four knights are 
fully described. 

2 The (sixth) Earl of Rutland consulted 'M'' Shakspeare' about his 
'impresa,' nine months after he succeeded to the earldom on the death 
on June 26, 1612, without issue, of his elder brother Roger, the fifth 
Earl, who was long the Earl of Southampton's closest friend. There 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE ■ 455 

joined the Earl of Southampton and his own elder brother 
in the Earl of Essex's plot of 1601 and had endured im- 
prisonment with them till the end of Queen Elizabeth's 
reign. In August 16 12, barely two months after his 
succession to the earldom, he entertained King James 
and the Prince of Wales with regal splendour at Bel voir 
Castle, the family seat. It was some six months 
later that he solicited the aid of Shakespeare and 
Burbage in designing an 'impresa' for the coming royal 
tournament. The poet and critic Sir Henry Wotton, 
who witnessed the mimic warfare, noted, in a letter 
to a friend, the cryptic subtlety of the many jousters' 
'imprese.' ^ In the household book of the Earl of 
Rutland which is preserved at Belvoir Castle, due 
record was made of the pa3anent to Shakespeare 
and Burbage of forty-four shillings apiece for their 
services. The entry runs thus: 'Item 31 Martij [1613] 
to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lordes Impreso (sic) 
xliiijs. To Richard Burbadge for paynting and making 

had been talk of a marriage between the Earl of Southampton and his 
sister Lady Bridget Manners. The two Earls were constant visitors to- 
gether to the London theatres at the end of the sixteenth century, and 
both suffered imprisonment in the Tower of London for complicity in 
the Earl of Essex's plot early in 1601. The fifth Earl's wife was daughter 
of Sir Philip Sidney, and she cultivated the society of men of letters, 
constantly entertaining and corresponding with Ben Jonson and Francis 
Beaumont. 

1 Unluckily neither Wotton nor anyone else reported the details of 
Shakespeare's invention for the Earl of Rutland. Writing to his friend 
Sir Edmund Bacon from London on March 31, 1613, Wotton described 
the tournament thus : ' The day fell out wet, to the disgrace of many 
fine plumes . . . The two Riches [i.e. Sir Robert Rich and Sir Henry 
Rich, brothers of the first Earl of Holland] only made a speech to the 
King. The rest [of whom the Earl of Rutland is mentioned by name as 
one] were contented with bare imprese, whereof some were so dark that 
their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their 
meaning, not to be understood. The two best to my fancy were those 
of the two earl brothers [i.e. the Earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery]. 
The first a small, exceeding white pearl, and the words solo candore valeo. 
The other, a sun casting a glance on the side of a pillar, and the beams 
reflecting with the motto Spletidente refulget, in which device there seemed 
an agreement : the elder brother to allude to his own nature, and the 
other to his fortune.' (Logan Pearsall-Smith, Life and Letters of Sir 
Henry Wotton, Oxford, 1907, vol. ii. p. i?.) 



456 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

yt in gold xliiijs. [Total] iiij" viijl' ^ The prefix 'Mr.,' 
the accepted mark of gentihty, stands in the Earl of 
Rutland's account-book before the dramatist's name 
alone. Payment was obviously rendered the two men 
in the new gold pieces called 'jacobuses,' each of which 
was worth about 22s? 

During the same month (March 16 13), in which Bur- 
bage and Shakespeare were exercising their ingenuity 
Shake- ^^ ^^^ -^^^^ °^ Rutland's behalf, the dramatist 
speare's was engaging in a private business transaction 
ThoSeln"^ in London. While on a visit to the metropoHs 
Biackfriars, in the Same spring, Shakespeare invested a 
^ ^^' small sum of money in a new property, not 

far distant from the Biackfriars theatre. This was his 
last investment in real estate, and his procedure closely 
followed the example of his friend Richard Burbage, 
who with his brother Cuthbert also acquired pieces of 
land or houses in their private capacity within the 
Biackfriars demesne.^ Shakespeare now purchased a 
house, with a yard attached, which was situated within 

^ The Historical Manuscripts Commission's Report on the Historical 
Manuscripts of Belvoir Castle, calendared by Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, 
Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records and Mr. W. H. Stevenson, vol. iv. 
p. 494 ; see article by the present writer in The Times, December 27, 1905. 

2 Abundant evidence is accessible of Burbage's repute as a painter. 
An authentic specimen of his brush — 'a man's head' — which belonged 
to Edward Alleyn, the actor and founder of Dulwich College, may stUl 
be seen at the Dulwich College Gallery. That Burbage's labour in 
'painting and making' the 'impresa' which Shakespeare suggested and 
interpreted was satisfactory to the Earl of Rutland is amply proved by 
another entry in the Duke of Rutland's household books which attests 
that Burbage was employed on a like work by the Earl three years later. 
On March 25, 1616, the Earl again took part in a til ting-match at Court 
on the anniversary of James I.'s accession. On that occasion, too, his 
shield was entrusted to Burbage for armorial embellishment, and the 
actor-artist received for his new labour the enhanced remuneration of 
4- 18^. The entry runs: 'Paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lorde's 
shelde and for the embleance, 4^. 18^.' Shakespeare was no longer Bur- 
bage's associate. At the moment he lay on what proved to be his death- 
bed at Stratford. 

^ The Burbages' chief purchases of private property in Biackfriars 
were dated in 1601, 1610, and 1614 respectively. See Biackfriars Rec- 
ords, ed. A. Feuillerat, Malone Soc. Collections, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 70 seq. 



ht oft fn w |acO \}S^4 
CS^: \7/,.J5 3o£»c 14; c 






> 




SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE APPENDED TO 
THE PURCHASE-DEED OF A HOUSE IN BLACKFRIARS 
ON MARCH lo, 1612-13. 

Reproduced from the original document now preserved in the Guildhall 
Library, London. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 457 

six hundred feet of the Blackfriars theatre.^ The former 
owner, Henry Walker, a musician, had bought the 
property for 100/. in 1604 of one Matthew Bacon of 
Holborn, a student of Gray's Inn. Shakespeare in 
1 613 agreed to pay Walker 140/. The deeds of convey- 
ance bear the date March 10 in that year.^ By a legal 
device Shakespeare made his ownership a joint tenancy, 
associating with himself three merely nominal partners 
or trustees, viz. William Johnson, citizen and vintner of 
London, John Jackson and John Hemynge of London, 
gentlemen. The effect of such a legal technicality was 
to deprive Shakespeare's wife, if she survived him, of 
a right to receive from the estate a widow's dower. 
Hemynge was probably Shakespeare's theatrical col- 
league. On March 1 1 , the day following the conveyance 
of the property, Shakespeare executed another deed 
(now in the British Museum^) which stipulated that 
60/. of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage, 
with Henry Walker, the former owner, until the follow- 
ing Michaelmas. The money was unpaid at Shake- 
speare's death three years later. In both purchase- 
deed and mortgage-deed Shakespeare's signature was 
witnessed by (among others) Henry Lawrence, ' servant ' 
or clerk to Robert Andrewes, the scrivener who drew 
the deeds, and, Lawrence's seal, bearing his initials 
'H. L.,' was stamped in each case on the parchment- 
tag, across the head of which Shakespeare wrote his 
name. In all three documents — the two indentures 
and the mortgage-deed — Shakespeare is described as 

^ It stood on the west side of St. Andrew's Hill, formerly termed 
Puddle Hill or Puddle Dock Hill, adjoining what is now known as Ire- 
land Yard. Opposite the house was an old building known as 'The 
King's Wardrobe.' The ground-floor was in the occupation of one 
William Ireland, a haberdasher. 

2 The indenture prepared for the purchaser is in the Halliwell-Phillipps 
collection, which was sold to Mr. Marsden J. Perry of Providence, 
Rhode Island, U.S.A., in January 1897, and now belongs to Mr. H. C. 
Folger of New York. The indenture held by the vendor is in the Guild- 
hall Library. 

3 Egerton MS. 1787. 



458 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of Stratford-on-Avon, in the Countie of Warwick, Gentle- 
man.' It was as an investment, not for his own occupa- 
tion, that he acquired the property. He at once leased 
it to John Robinson, a resident in the neighbourhood.^ 

Two years later Shakespeare joined some neighbouring 
owners in a suit for the recovery of documents relating 
to his title in this newly acquired Blackfriars 
spear^e's property. The full story of the Htigation is 
litigation still to Seek; but papers belonging to one 
Blackfriars Stage of it have been brought to light, and 
property, i^y^y supply a final illustration, within a year 
of his death, of Shakespeare's habitual readiness 
to enforce his legal rights. On April 26, 161 5, a 'bill of 
complaint' or petition was addressed in Chancery to Sir 
Thomas Egerton, the Lord Chancellor, by 'Willyam 
Shakespere gent' (jointly with six fellow complainants, 
Sir Thomas Bendish, baronet, Edward Newport and 
William Thoresbie, esquires, Robert Dormer, esquire, 
and Marie his wife, and Richard Bacon, citizen of Lon- 
don). The Chancellor's 'orators' prayed him to compel 
Matthew Bacon of Gray's Inn, a former owner of Shake- 
speare's Blackfriars house, to deliver up to them a 
number of 'letters patent, deeds, evidences, charters 
and writings,' which, it was alleged, were wrongfully 
detained by him and concerned their title to various 
houses and lands 'within the precinct of Blackfriars in 
the City of London or county of Middlesex.' The houses 
and lands involved in the dispute are sufficiently de- 
scribed for legal purposes ; but no specific detail identifies 
their exact sites or their precise destribution among the 
several owners.^ On May 15 the defendant Matthew 

^ Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii. 25-41. 

^ The disputed property is thus collectively described in the ' bill of 
complaint': 'One Capitall Messuage or Dwellinge howse w[th] there 
app[u]rten[a]nces w[th] two Court Yardes and one void plot of ground 
sometymes vsed for a garden of the East p[te] of the said Dwellinge 
howse and so Much of one Edifice as now or sometymes served for two 
Stables and one little Colehowse adioyninge to the said Stables Lyinge 
on the South Side of the said Dwellinge howse And of another Messuage 
or Tenem[te] w[th] thapp[ur]ten[a]nces now in the occupac[i]on of An- 




SHAKESPEARE'S AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE APPENDED TO 
A DEED MORTGAGING HIS HOUSE IN BLACKFRIARS 
ON MARCH II, 1612-13. 

Reproduced from the original document now preserved in the British 
Museum. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 459 

Bacon filed his answer to the complaint of Shakespeare 
and his associates. Bacon did not dispute the complain- 
ants' right to the property in question, and he admitted 
that a collection of deeds came into his hands on the 
recent death of Anne Bacon his mother/ who had owned 
them for many years ; but he denied precise knowledge 
of their contents and all obligation to part with them. 
On May 22, the Court of Chancery decreed the surrender 
of the papers to Sir Thomas Bendish, Edward Newport, 
and the other petitioners.^ Shakespeare's participation 
in the successful suit involved him in personal negotia- 
tion with his co-plaintiffs and confirms the persistence of 
his London associations after he had finally removed 
to Stratford. 

The records of Stratford-on-Avon meanwhile show 
that at the same time as Shakespeare was protecting 
his interests elsewhere he was taking a full shake- 
share there of social and civic responsibilities, speare and 
In 161 1 the chief townsmen of Stratford were ford 
anxious to obtain an amendment of existing highways, 
statutes for the repair of the highways. A fund was col- 
lected for the purpose of 'prosecuting' an amending bill 
in ParHament. The hst of contributors, which is still 
extant in the Stratford archives, includes Shakespeare's 
name. The words 'Mr. WilHam Shackespere' are 

thony Thompson and Thom[a]s Perckes and of there Assignes, & of a 
void peece of grownd whervppon a Stable is builded to the said messuage 
belonginge and of seu[e]rall othere howses Devided into seu[er]all Lodg- 
inges or Dwellinge howses Toginther w[th] all and Singuler sell[ors] 
Sollers Chambers Halls p[ar]lo[rs] Yardes Backsides Easem[tes] P[ro]fites 
and Comodityes Hervnto seu[er]alUe belonginge And of Certaine Void 
plots of grownd adioyinge to the said Messuages and p[re]misses afore- 
said or vnto some of them And of a Well howse All w[ch] messuages 
Tenemen[ts] and p[re]misses aforesaid be Lyinge w[th] in the p[re]cinct 
of Blackffriers in the Cittye of London or Countye of Middl[esex].' 

^ Anne Bacon owned property adjoining Shakespeare's house at the 
time of his purchase. See deeds in Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 32, 37. 

2 Dr. C. W. Wallace, of the University of Nebraska, discovered the 
three cited documents in this suit in the autumn of 1905 at the Public 
Record Office. Full copies were printed by Dr. Wallace in the Standard 
newspaper on October 18, 1905, and again in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch 
for April 1906. 



460 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

written in the margin as though they were added after 
the Hst was first drawn up. The dramatist was probably- 
absent when the movement was set on foot, and gave it his 
support on his return to the town from a London visit.^ 
The poet's family circle at Stratford was large, and 
their deaths, marriages, and births diversified the course 
Domestic of his domestic history. Early in September 
incident. j5o8 his mother (Mary Arden) died at a ripe 
age, exceeding seventy years, in the Birthplace at Henley 
Street, where her daughter Mrs. Joan Hart and her 
grandchildren resided with her. She was buried in the 
churchyard on the ninth of the month, just fifty-one 
years since her marriage and after seven years of widow- 
hood. Three and a half years later, on February 3, 
161 1-2, there appears in the burial register of Stratford 
Church the entry 'Gilbert Shakespeare adolescens.' 
Shakespeare's brother, Gilbert, who was his junior by 
two and a half years, had then reached his forty-sixth 
year, an age to which the term ' adolescens ' seems in- 
applicable. Nothing is certainly known of Gilbert's 
history save that on May i, 1602, he represented the 
dramatist at Stratford when William and John Combe 
conveyed to the latter 107 acres of arable land, and that 
on March 5, 1609-10, he signed his name as witness 
of a deed to which some very humble townsfolk were 
parties.^ An eighteenth-century tradition represents 

^ The list of names of contributors to the fund is in Stratford-upon- 
Avon Corporation Records, Miscell. Docs. I. No. 4, fol. 6. The document 
is headed 'Wednesdaye the xjth of September, 161 1, Colected towardes 
the Charge of prosecutyng the Bill in parliament for the better Repayre 
of the highe Wales, and amendinge diuers defectes in the statutes already 
made.' The seventy names include all the best known citizens, e.g. 
'Thomas Greene, Esquire,' Abraham Sturley, Henry Walker, Julius 
Shawe, John Combes, William Combes, Mrs. Quynye, John Sadler. 
Only in the case of Thomas Greene, the town clerk, is the amount of 
the contribution specified; he subscribed 2s. 6d. 

2 On the date in question Gilbert Shakespeare's signature, which 
is in an educated style of handwriting, was appended to a lease by 
Margery Lorde, a tavern-keeper in Middle Row, of a few yards of ground 
to a neighbour Richard Smyth alias Courte, a butcher. The document 
is exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace (see Catalogue, No. 115). 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 46 1 

that Gilbert Shakespeare lived to a patriarchal age and 
was a visitor to London near his death. It is commonly 
assumed that the Gilbert Shakespeare who died at 
Stratford early in 161 2 was a son of the poet's brother 
Gilbert; but the identification remains uncertain.^ It 
is well established, however, that precisely a year later 
(February 4, 161 2-3), Shakespeare's next brother Rich- 
ard, who was just completing his thirty-ninth year, was 
buried in the churchyard. 

Happier episodes characterised the affairs of Shake- 
speare's own household. His two daughters Susanna and 
Judith both married in his last years, and the Marriage 
union of his elder daughter Susanna was satis- of Susanna 
factory from all points of view. On June 5, speared 
1607, she wedded, at Stratford parish church, at ^^°7. 
the age of twenty-four, John Hall, a medical practitioner, 
who was eight years her senior. Hall, an educated man 
of Puritan leanings, was no native of Stratford, but at the 
opening of the seventeenth century he acquired there a 
good practice, which extended far into the countryside. 
The bride and bridegroom settled in a house in the 
thoroughfare leading to the church known as Old Town, 
nor far from New Place. Their residence still stands and 
bears the name of Hall's Croft. In the February follow- 
ing their marriage there was born to them a daughter 
Elizabeth, who was baptised in the parish church on 
February 21, 1607-8. The Halls had no other children, 
and Elizabeth Hall was the only grandchild of the poet 
who was born in his lifetime. She proved to be his last 
surviving descendant. Stratford society was prone to 

1 Mrs. Stopes confutes Halliwell-Phillipps's assertion that Gilbert 
Shakespeare became a haberdasher in London in the parish of St. Bridget 
or St. Bride's. She shows that Halliwell-Phillipps has confused Gilbert 
Shakespeare with one Gilbert Shepheard. Mrs. Stopes also points 
out that in the Stratford burial register of the early seventeenth cen- 
tury the terms adolescens, adolescentidus , and adolescentula were all 
used rather loosely, being applied to dead persons who had passed the 
period of youth. But her identification of the entry of February 3, 161 1- 
2, with Shakespeare's brother Gilbert remains questionable. (See her 
Shakespeare^ s Environment, 63-5; 332-5.) 



462 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

slanderous gossip, and Mrs. Susanna Hall was in 1613, 
to her father's perturbation, the victim of a libellous 
rumour of immoral conduct, which was circulated by 
John Lane junior, son of a substantial fellow-townsman. 
A defamation suit was brought by Mrs. Hall against 
Lane in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Worcester, 
with the satisfactory result that the slanderer, who failed 
to put in an appearance at the hearing, was excommuni- 
cated on July 27. The case was heard on July 15 at 
the western end of the south aisle of the Cathedral, and 
the chief witness for the injured lady was Robert What- 
cote, one of the witnesses of Shakespeare's will.^ 

The dramatist's younger daughter Judith married later 
than her sister, on February 10, 161 5-6, some two months 
Marriage before her father's death, and during (it would 
o^j^J^dith appear) his last illness. The bride had reached 
speare, her thirty-sccond year. Thomas Quiney, the 
1616. bridegroom, was her junior by four years. He 

was a younger son of Shakespeare's close friend of middle 
Hfe, Richard Quiney, the Stratford mercer, who had ap- 
pealed to the dramatist in 1598 for a loan of money, and 
had died while baiHff in 1601. Judith Shakespeare was 
a close friend of the Quiney family, and on December 4, 
161 1, she witnessed for Richard Quiney 's widow and for 
her eldest son Adrian the deed of sale of a house belong- 
ing to them at Stratford.^ Judith Shakespeare's mar- 
riage with Thomas Quiney was solemnised during Lent, 
when ecclesiastical law prescribed that a Kcense should 
be obtained before the performance of the rite. Banns, 
no doubt, had been called, but the wedding was hurried 
on, and took place before a license was obtained. The 

^ The sentence was entered in the Worcester Diocesan Registry, 
Act Book No. 9. According to the record of the Court, John Lane ' about 
five weeks reported that the plaintiff had the runninge of the raynes, 
and had bin naught with Rafe Smith and John Palmer.' See J. W. 
Gia.y, Shakespeare's Marriage, 167, 208. Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Out- 
lines, i. 242 ; ii. 243-4, 394. 

^_The deed is exhibited at Shakespeare's Birthplace {Cat. No. 91). 
Judith makes her mark by way of signature. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 463 

Bishop's Consistory Court at Worcester consequently 
issued a citation to Thomas Quiney and his wife to ex- 
plain the omission. They put in no appearance, and a 
decree of excom.munication was issued.^ The poet died 
before judgment was delivered. He promised his 
daughter a marriage portion of 100/. which was unpaid 
at his death ; he made, however, belated provision for 
it in his will.^ The matrimonial union which opened 
thus inauspiciously was marred by many misfortunes. 
The development of the religious temper of the town 
in Shakespeare's latest years can scarcely have har- 
monised with his own sentiment. With Puri- ^ 

, 1 . . • ^ . 1 1 Growth of 

tans, whose outcries against the drama never Puritanism 
ceased, Shakespeare was out of sympathy,^ atstrat- 
and he could hardly have viewed with unvary- 
ing composure the steady progress that puritanism was 
making among his fellow-townsmen. In 161 5 William 
Combe, the local landowner, with whom Shakespeare 
lived on friendly terms, comprehensively denounced 
the townsfolk in a moment of anger as 'Puritan knaves.' 
Nevertheless a preacher, doubtless of Puritan proclivi- 
ties, was entertained at Shakespeare's residence. New 
Place, after delivering a sermon in the spring of 16 14. 
The incident might serve to illustrate Shakespeare's 

^ See J. W. Gray, Shakespeare's Marriage, p. 248. 

2 A hundred and fifty pounds is described as a substantial jointure in 
Merry Wives (iii. iv.,49). Thomas Combe appointed by his will the large 
sum of 400I. as the marriage portion of each of his two daughters. 

^ Shakespeare's references to Puritans in the plays of his middle and 
late life are so uniformly discourteous that they must be judged to re- 
flect his personal feeling. Cf. the following conversation concerning 
Malvolio in Twelfth Night (11. iii. 153 et seq.) : 

Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan. 
Sm Andrew. ! if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog. 
Sm Toby. What, for being a puritan ? thy exquisite reason, dear knight. 
Sir Andrew. I have no exquisite reason for 't, but I have reason good 
enough. 

In Winter's Tale (iv. iii. 46), the Clown, after making contemptuous 
references to the character of the shearers, remarks that there is 'but 
one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes.' In 
much the same tone Mrs. Quickly says in Merry Wives {i. iv. 10) of the 
servant John Rugby: 'His worst fault is that he is given to prayer,' 



464 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

characteristic placability, but his son-in-law Hall, who 
avowed sympathy with puritanism, was probably in 
the main responsible for the civility. The town council 
of Stratford-on-Avon, whose meeting-chamber almost 
overlooked Shakespeare's residence of New Place, gave 
curious proof of their puritanic suspicion of the drama 
on February 7, 161 1-2, when they passed a resolution 
that plays were unlawful and 'the sufferance of them 
against the orders heretofore made and against the 
example of other well-governed cities and boroughs,' 
and the council was therefore 'content,' the resolution 
ran, that ' the penalty of xs. imposed [on players hereto- 
fore] be xli. henceforward.' ^ 

A more definite anxiety arose in the summer of 16 14 
from a fresh outbreak of fire in the town on Saturday, 
The Fire July Q. The Outbreak would appear to have 
of 1614. caused little less damage than the conflagrations 
at the end of the previous century. The town was de- 
clared once more to be 'ruinated by fyre' and appeal 
was made for relief to the charitable generosity of the 
neighbouring cities and villages.^ 

^ Ten years later the King's players (Shakespeare's own company) 
were bribed by the council to leave the town without playing. (See 
the present writer's Stratford-on-Avon, p. 270.) 

2 According to the Order Book of the Town Council (B. 267), the 
justices of the shire were requested, on July 15, 1614, to obtain royal 
letters patent authorising a collection through various parts of England in 
order to retrieve the town's losses by fire. The Council reported that : 
'Within the space of lesse than two howres [there were] consumed and 
burnt fifty and fower dwelling howses, many of them being very faire 
houses, besides Barnes, Stables, and other howses of office, together 
with great store of Come, Hay, Straw, Wood and timber therein, amount- 
ing to the value of Eight thowsand pounds and upwards; the force of 
which fier was so great (the wind sitting ful upon the towne) that it 
dispersed into so many places thereof, whereby the whole towne was in 
very great danger to have beene utterly consumed.' (Wheler's Hist, of 
Stratford, p. 15.) The official authorisation of the collection was not 
signed by King James till May 11, 1616, and the local collectors were 
not nominated till June 29 following. {Stratford Archives, Miscell. Doc. 
vii. 122.) Charitable contributions were invited from the chief towns 
in the Midlands and the South, ' towardes the new buyldyng reedifyeing 
and erectyng of the sayd Towne of Stratford upon Avon, and the relief 
of aU such his majesties poore distressed subiectes their wives and chil- 
dren as have sustayned losse and decay by the misfortune of a sodayne 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 465 

Shakespeare's social circle clearly included all the 
better-to-do inhabitants. The tradesfolk, from whom 
the baihff , aldermen, and councillors were shake- 
drawn were his nearest neighbours, and speare's 
among them were numerous friends of his at strat- 
youth. But within a circuit of some mile or ^°^^- 
two there lay the houses and estates of many country 
gentlemen, justices of the peace, who cultivated intimacies 
with prominent townspeople, and were linked by social 
ties with the prosperous owner of New Place. Sir 
Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the inspirer of Justice 
Shallow, belonged to a past generation, and his type 
was decaying. Official duties often called to Stratford 
in Shakespeare's last days a neighbouring landowner 
who combined in a singular degree poetic and political 
repute. At Alcester, some nine miles from Stratford, 
stood the ancestral mansion of Beauchamp Court, 
where lived the poet and politician Sir Fulke Greville. 
On his father's death in 1606 he was chosen to succeed 
him in the office of Recorder of the borough of Stratford, 
and he retained the post till he died twenty-two years 
later. As recorder and also as justice of the peace Sii: 
Fulke paid several visits year by year to the town and 
accepted the hospitality of the bailiff and his circle. A 
short walk across the borders of Gloucestershire separated 
New Place from the manor house of Clifford Chambers, 
the residence of Sir Henry and Lady Rainsford.^ Their 
lifelong patronage of Michael Drayton, another War- 
wickshire poet and Shakespeare's friend, gives gj^ Henry 
them an honoured place in literary history. ^^|?,^^'^'|, 
Drayton was born at the village of Plartshill chambers. 

and terrible fire there happenynge.' The returns seem to have proved 
disappointing. The fire at Stratford-on-Avon, in the summer of 1614, 
made sufficient impression on the public mind to justify its mention 
in Edmund Howes' edition of Stow's Chronicle, 163 1, p. 1004. No other 
notice of the town appears in that comprehensive record.- 

^ Sir Henry, born in 1575, married in 1596 and was knighted at King 
James I.'s coronation on July 23, 1603. (Cf. Bristol and Gloucestershire 
Archceolog. Soc. Journal, xiv. 63 seq., and Genealogist, ist ser. ii. 105.) 



466 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

near Atherstone in the northern part of the county, 
and Lady Rainsford's father Sir Henry Goodere had 
brought the boy up in his ajdacent manor of Poles- 
worth. Lady Rainsford before her marriage was the 
adored mistress of Draytor's youthful muse, and in the 
days of his maturity, Drayton, who was always an enthu- 
siastic lover of his native county, was the guest for many 
months each year of her husband and herself at Chfford 
Chambers, which, as he wrote in his 'Polyolbion,' hath 
'been many a time the Muses' quiet port.' Drayton's 
host found at Stratford and its environment his closest 
friends, and several of his intimacies were freely shared 
by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's son-in-law, John Hall, 
a medical practitioner of Stratford, reckoned Lady 
Rainsford among his earliest patients from the first 
years of the century, and Drayton himself, while a guest 
at Clifford Chambers, came under Hall's professional 
care. The dramatist's son-in-law cured Drayton of a 
'tertian' by the administration of 'syrup of violets' 
and described him in his casebook as 'an excellent poet.' ^ 
Drayton was not the only common friend of Shake- 
speare and Sir Henry Rainsford. Both enjoyed at 
Stratford personal intercourse with the wealthy land- 
owning family of the Combes, the chief members of 
which lived within the limits of the borough of Strat- 
ford, while they took rank with the landed gentry 

^ Sir Henry Rainsford owned additional property in the hamlet of 
Alveston on the banks of the Avon across Stratford bridge. Drayton 
celebrated Sir Henry Rainsford's death on January 27, 1621-2, at the 
age of forty-six, with an affectionate elegy in which he described Sir 
Henry as ' what a friend should be ' and praised ' his care of me ' as proof 

'that to no other end 
He had been born but only for my friend.' 

Rainsford's heir, also Sir Henry Rainsford {d. 1641), continued to the 
poet until his death the hospitality of Clifford Chambers. Drayton's 
last extant letter, which is addressed to the Scottish poet Drummond 
of Hawthornden, is dated from 'Clifford in Gloucestershire, 14 July 
1.631'; Drayton explains that he is writing from 'a knight's house in 
Gloucestershire, to which place I yearly use to come in the summertime 
to recreate myself, and to spend some two or three months in the coun- 
try.' (Oliver Elton, Introdtiction to Michael Drayton, 1895, p. 43.) 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 467 

of the county. With three generations of this family 
Shakespeare maintained social relations. The Combes 
came to Stratford in Henry VIII's reign from North 
Warwickshire, and after the dissolution of the 
monasteries, they rapidly acquired a vast series of 
estates, not in Warwickshire alone, but also in the ad- 
joining counties of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. 
The part of the town known as Old Stratford re- 
mained the family's chief place of abode, though 
William Combe, a younger son of the first Strat- 
ford settler, made his home at Warwick. It was by 
the purchase of land at Stratford from William Combe 
of Warwick jointly with his nephew John Combe of 
Stratford in 1602 that Shakespeare laid the broad 
foundations of his local estate. While the dramatist 
was establishing his position in his native town, John 
Coiiibe and his elder brother, Thomas, exerted an im- 
posing influence on the social fortunes of the 
town. Thomas Combe acquired of the Crown combe of 
in I sq6 for his residence the old Tudor mansion \^^ ^°^" 
near the church known as ' The College House.' ^ 
There Drayton's host of Clifford Chambers was an hon- 
oured visitor. Thomas Combe stood godfather to Sir 
Henry Rainsford's son and heir (of the same names), and 
when he made his will on December 22, 1608, he sum- 
moned from CKfford Chambers both Sir Henry and the 
knight's guardian and stepfather 'William Barnes, es- 
quire ' to act as witnesses and to accept the office of over- 
seers. The testator described the two men, who were 
deeply attached to each other, as his 'good friends' in 
whom he reposed 'a special trust and confidence.' ^ 

^ According to his will he left to his son and heir William (subject 
to his wife's tenancy for life or a term of thirty years) ' the house I dwell 
in called The College House and the ortyards and other appurtenances 
therewith, to me by our late Sovereign Queen Elizabeth devised.' These 
words dispose of the often repeated error that Thomas Combe's brother 
John was owner of 'The College House,' which duly descended to Thomas 
Combe's heir William. 

^ Thomas Combe's will is at Somerset House (P.C.C. Dorset 13). 
Combe was buried at Stratford church on January 11, 1608-9, ^^'^ ^s 



468 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

With Thomas Combe's sons William and Thomas, the 
former of whom succeeded to his vast property and in- 
john fiuence, Shakespeare was actively associated 

Combe of until his last days. But the member of the 
Combe family whose personality appealed 
most strongly to the dramatist was Thomas Combe's 
brother John, a confirmed bachelor,^ who in spite of 
his ample landed estate largely added to his resources 
by loans of money on interest to local tradespeople and 
farmers. For some thirty years he kept busy the local 
court of record with a long series of suits against de- 
faulting clients. Nevertheless his social position in 
town and county was quite as good as that of his brother 
Thomas or his uncle Wilham. A charitable instinct 
qualified his usurious practices and he Hved on highly 
amiable terms with his numerous kinsfolk, with his 
Stratford neighbours, and with the leading gentry of the 
county. His real property included a house at War- 
wick, where his uncle William held much property, a 
substantial estate at Hampton Lucy, and much land at 
Stratford, including a meadow at Shottery. On Jan- 
uary 28, 1612-3, he made his will, and he died on July 
12 next year (1614). He distributed his vast property 
with much precision.^ Two brothers (George and John), 

will was proved by his executor and elder son, William, on February 10, 
1608-9. His widow Mary was buried on April 5, 161 7. 

^ Many of Shakespeare's biographers wrongly credit Combe with a 
wife and children. Cf. Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 449, J. C. M. Bellew's 
Shakespeare's Home, 1863, pp. 67 and 365 seq. ; Mrs. Stopes, Shake- 
speare's Warwickshire Contemporaries, 1907, p. 220. The confusion is 
due to the fact that his father, a married step-brother, and a married 
nephew all bore the same Christian name of John. The terms of the 
will of the John Combe who was Shakespeare's especial friend leave his 
celibacy in no doubt. 

^ Combe's will is preserved at Somerset House. An ofHce copy 
signed by three deputy registrars of the Prerogative Court of Canter- 
bury is among the Stratford Records, Miscell. Doc. vii. 254. The will 
was proved by the nephew and executor, Thomas Combe, on Novem- 
ber 10, 1615 (not 1616 as has been erroneously stated). The pecuniary 
bequests amount to 1500/. A fair sum was left to charity. Apart from 
bequests of 20Z. to the poor of Stratford, 5/. to the poor of Alcester, and 
5/. to the poor of Warwick, all the testator's debtors were granted relief 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 469 

a sister (Mrs. Hyatt) , an uncle (John Blount, his mother's 
brother), many nephews, nieces, cousins, and servants 
were all generously remembered. His nephew Thomas 
(younger son of his late brother Thomas) was his heir and 
residuary legatee. But a wider historic interest dis- 
tinguishes John Combe's testamentary trib- , 
utes to his friends who were not Hneally re- legacy to 
lated to him. To 'Mr. William Shakespeare' Shake- 
he left five pounds. Sir Henry Rainsford of 
CHfford Chambers was an overseer of the will, receiving 
5/. for his service, while Lady Rainsford was allotted 4.0s. 
wherewith to buy a memorial ring. Another overseer of 
as high a standing in the county was Sir Francis Smyth, 
lord of the manor of Wootton Wawen, who received an 
additional 5/. wherewith to buy a hawk, while on his 
wife Lady Ann was bestowed the large sum of 40/. 
wherewith to buy a bason and ewer. There were three 
executors, each receiving 20/. ; with the heir Thomas 
Combe, there were associated in that capacity Bartholo- 
mew Hales, the squire of Snitterfield, and Sir Richard 
Verney, knight, of Compton Verney, whose wife was 
sister of Sir Fulke Greville the poet and politician.^ 

Combe directed that he should be buried in Stratford 
Church, 'near to the place where my mother was buried,' 

of a shilling in the pound on the discharge of their debts ; lool. was to 
be applied in loans to fifteen poor or young tradesmen of Stratford for 
terms of three years, at two-and-a-half per cent, interest, the interest to 
be divided among the Stratford almsfolk. The bequest of Shottery 
meadow to a cousin, Thomas Combe, was saddled with an annual pay- 
ment of 7/. 135. 4d. — il. for two sermons in Stratford Church, and the 
rest for ten black gowns for as many poor people to be chosen by the 
bailiff and aldermen. Henry Walker, whose son William was Shake- 
speare's godson, received twenty shillings. The bequests to John's 
brother George included 'the close or grounds known by the name of 
Parson's Close alias Shakespeare's Close' — land at Hampton Lucy, 
which has been erroneously assumed to owe its alternative title to as- 
sociation with the dramatist {Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 497 seq.). 
^ The third overseer was Sir Edward Blount, a kinsman of the tes- 
tator's mother, and the fourth was John Palmer of Compton, whose 
lineage was traceable to a very remote period. Dugdale in his Antiq- 
uities of Warwickshire gives a full account of the families of Smyth of 
Wootton Wawen, Verney of Compton Verney, and Palmer of Compton. 



470 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and that a convenient tomb of the value of threescore 
pounds should 'within one year of my decease be set 
Combe's over me.' An elaborate altar tomb with a 
tomb. coloured recumbent effigy still stands in a re- 

cess cut into the east wall of the chancel. The sculptor 
was Garret Johnson, a tomb-maker of Dutch descent 
Hving in Southwark, who within a very few years was 
to undertake a monument near at hand in honour of 
Shakespeare.^ According to contemporary evidence, 
there was long ' fastened ' to Combe's tomb in Stratford 
Church four doggerel verses which derisively condemned 
Combe's his reputed practice of lending money at the 
epitaph. j-ate of ten per cent. The crude lines were 
first committed to print in 1618 when they took this 
form : 

Ten-in-the-hiundred must lie in his grave, 

But a hundred to ten whether God will him have. 

Who then must be interr'd in this tombe? 

Oh, quoth the Divill, my John-a-Combe. 

The first couplet would seem to have been adapted 
from an epigram devised to cast ridicule on some earlier 
member of the usurious profession who had no concern 
with Combe or Stratford.^ In 1634 a Norwich visitor to 
Stratford who kept a diary first recorded the local tradi- 
tion to the effect that Shakespeare was himself the author 

1 See pp. 494-5 infra. 

2 The epitaph as quoted above appeared in Richard Brathwaite's 
Remains in 16 18 under the heading: 'Upon one John Combe of Strat- 
ford upon Aven, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had 
Caused to be built in his Life Time.' The first two hues imitate a 
couplet previously in print : see H[enry] P[arrot]'s The More the Merrier 
(a collection of Epigrams, 1608), 

Feneratoris Epitaphium. 

Ten in the hundred lies under this stone, 
And a hundred to ten to the devil he's gone. 

Cf. also Camden's epitaph of 'an usurer' in his Remaines, 1614 (ed. 
1870, pp. 429-430) : 

Here lyes ten in the hundred. 

In the ground fast ramm'd ; 

'Tis a hundred to ten 

But his soule is damn'd. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 471 

of the 'witty and facetious verses' at Combe's expense 
which were then to be read on Combe's monument.^ 
The story of Shakespeare's authorship was adopted on 
independent local testimony both by John Aubrey and 
by the poet's first biographer Nicholas Rowe.^ Other 
impromptu salhes of equally futile mortuary wit were 
assigned to Shakespeare by collectors of anecdotes 
early in the seventeenth century. But the internal 
evidence for them is as unconvincing as in the case of 
Combe's doggerel epitaph.^ 

^ Lansdowne MS. 2i3f. 3327;; see p. 598 and note infra. 

2 The lines as quoted by Aubrey {Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 226) run : 

Ten in the hundred the Devill allowes 

But Combes will have twelve, he sweares and vowes ; 

If any one askes, who lies in his tombe, 

Hah! quoth the Devill, 'Tis my John o Combe. 

Rowe's version runs somewhat differently : 

Ten-in-the-hundred lies here ingrav'd. 

'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not sav'd. 

If any man ask, who lies in this tomb ? 

Oh ! ho ! quoth the devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe. 

One Robert Dobyns, in 1673, cited, in an account of a visit to Stratford, 
the derisive verse in the form given by Rowe, adding 'since my being at 
Stratford the heires of Mr. Combe have caused these verses to be razed 
so yt they are not legible.' (See Athenceum, Jan. 19, 1901.) There is 
now no visible trace on Combe's tomb of any inscription save the original 
epitaph (inscribed above the effigy on the wall within the recess) which 
runs : 'Here lyeth interred the body of John Combe, Esqr., who departed 
this life the loth day of July Ao Dili 1614 bequeathed by his last will 
and testam.ent to pious and charitable uses these sumes in[s]ving annually 
to be paied for ever viz. xx^. for two sermons to be preached in this 
church, six poundes xiii^. & 4 pence to buy ten goundes for ten poore 
people within the borrough of Stratford & one hundred poundes to be 
lent unto 15 poore tradesmen of the same borrough from 3 yeares to 3 
yeares changing the pties every third yeare at the rate of fif tie shillinges 
p. anum the wch increase he appointed to be distributed toward the re- 
liefe of the almes people theire. More he gave to the poore o Statforde 
Twenty [pounds] . . .' The last word is erased. 

^ There is evidence that it was no uncommon sport for mts at social 
meetings of the period to suggest impromptu epitaphs for themselves 
and their friends, and Shakespeare is reported in many places to have 
engaged in the pastime. A rough epitaph sportively devised for Ben 
Jonson at a supper party is assigned to Shakespeare in several seven- 
teenth-century manuscript collections. According to Ashmole MS. 



472 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

John Combe's death involved Shakespeare more con- 
spicuously than before in civic affairs. Combe's two 
nephews, WilUam and Thomas/ sons of his 
threatened brother Thomas, who died in 1609, now divided 
enclosure, between them the family's large estates about 

^'^' Stratford. William had succeeded five years 

before to his father's substantive property including the 
College House, and Thomas now became owner of his 
uncle John's wealth. The elder brother, WilHam, was 
in his twenty-eighth year, and his brother, Thomas, 
was in his twenty-sixth year when their uncle John 
passed away. Wilham had entered the Middle Temple 
on October 17, 1602, when his grand-uncle Wilham 
Combe, of Warwick, was one of his sureties.^ Though 
the young man was not called to the bar, he made 
pretensions to some legal knowledge. Both brothers 
were of violent and assertive temper, the elder of the 
two showing the more domineering disposition. Within 
two months of their uncle's death, they came into 
serious conflict with the Corporation of Stratford-on- 
Avon. In the early autumn of 16 14 they announced a 

No. 38, Art. 340 (in the Bodleian Library), 'being Merrie att a Tauern, 
Mr. Jonson hauing begun this for his Epitaph — • 

Here lies Ben Johnson that was once one, 

he giues ytt to Mr. Shakspear to make up ; he presently wryght : 

Who while he liu'de was a sloe thing 
And now being dead is no thing.' 

Archdeacon Plume, in a manuscript note-book now in the corporation 
archives of Maldon, Essex, assigns to Shakespeare (on Bishop Hacket's 
authority) the feeble mock epitaph on Ben weakly expanded thus : 

Here lies Benjamin . . . w[it]h littl hair up [on] his chin 

Who w[hi]l[e] he hved w[as] a slow th[ing], and now he is d[ea]d is noth[ing]. 

Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that an unnamed friend 
had written of him {Conversations, p. 36) : 

Here lyes honest Ben 

That had not a beard on his chen. 

1 William was baptised at Stratford Church on December 8, 1586, 
and Thomas on February 9, 1588-9. 

2 Middle Temple Minutes of Parliament, p. 425. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 473 

resolve to enclose the borough's common lands on the 
outskirts of the town in the direction of Welcombe, 
Bishopton, and Old Stratford, hamlets about which 
some of the Combe property lay. The enclosure also 
menaced the large estate which, by the disposition of 
King Edward VI, owed tithes to the Corporation, and 
after the expiration of a ninety-two years' lease was to 
become in 1636 the absolute property of the town. 

The design of the Combes had much current precedent. 
In all parts of the country landowners had long been 
seeking 'to remove the ancient bounds of lands with a 
view to inclosing that which was wont to be common.' ^ 
The invasion of popular rights was everywhere hotly 
resented, and as recently as 1607 the enclosure of 
commons in north Warwickshire had provoked some- 
thing like insurrection.^ Although the disturbances 
were repressed with a strong hand, James I and his 
ministers disavowed sympathy with the landowners in 
their arrogant defiance of the public interest. 

The brothers Combe began work cautiously. They 
first secured the support of Arthur Mainwaring, the 
steward of the Lord Chancellor Elesmere, who j.^^ -p^^^^ 
was ex-officio lord of the manor of Stratford in Council's 
behalf of the Crown.^ Mainwaring resided in '^^^'^'^^'i'^^- 
London, knew nothing of local feeling, and was rep- 
resented at Stratford by one William Replingham, who 
acted as the Combes' agent. The Town Council at 
once resolved to offer the proposed spoliation as stout 
a resistance as had been offered like endeavours else- 
where. Thomas Greene, a cultivated lawyer, had been 
appointed the first town clerk of the town in 16 10, an 
office which was created by James I's new charter. He 
took prompt and effective action in behalf of the towns- 

^ Nashe's Works, ed. McKerrow, i. 33, 88, ii. 98. Cf. Stafford's 
Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints, 1581. 

^ Stow's Annals, ed. Howes, p. 890. 

^ Owing to the insolvency of Sir Edward Greville, of Milcote, who 
had been lord of the manor since 1596, the manor had recently passed 
to King James I. 



474 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

men. The town clerk, who had already given the 
dramatist some legal help, wrote of the dramatist as 
'my cosen Shakespeare.' Whatever the lineal relation- 
ship, Greene was to prove in the course of the coming 
controversy his confidential intimacy with Shakespeare 
alike in London and Stratford.^ 

Both parties to the strife bore witness to Shakespeare's 
local influence by seeking his countenance.^ But he 

^ Greene's history is not free of difi&culties. 'Thomas Green alias 
Shakspere' was buried in Stratford Church on March 6, 1589-90. The 
'alias' which impHes that Shakespeare was the maiden name of this 
man's mother suggested to Malone that he was father of the dramatist's 
legal friend. On the other hand Shakespeare's Thomas Greene who is 
described in the Stratford records {Misc. Doc. x. No. 23) as 'councillor 
at law, of the Middle Temple' is clearly identical with the student who 
was admitted at that Inn on November 20, 1595, and was described at 
the time in the Bench Book (p. 162) as 'son and heir of Thomas Greene 
of Warwick, gent.,' his father being then deceased. The Middle Temple 
student was called to the bar on October 29, 1600, and long retained 
chambers in the inn. His association with Stratford was a temporary 
episode in his career. He was acting as 'solicitor' or 'counsellor' for 
the Corporation in 1601, and on September 7, 1603, became steward (or 
judge) of the Court of Record there and clerk to the aldermen and 
burgesses. On July 8, 1610, he added to his office of steward the new 
post of town clerk or common clerk which was created by James I's 
charter of incorporation. Numerous papers in his crabbed handwriting 
are in the Stratford archives. He resigned both his local offices early 
in 1617 and soon after sold the house at Stratford which he occupied in 
Old Town as well as his share in the town tithes which he had acquired 
along with Shakespeare in 1605 and owned jointly with his wife Lettice 
or Letitia. Thenceforth he was exclusively identified with London, arid 
made some success at the bar, becoming autumn reader of his inn in 
162 1 and treasurer in 1629 {Middle Temple Bench Book, pp. 70-1). It is 
necessary to distinguish him from yet another Thomas Greene, a yeo- 
man of Bishopton, who was admitted a burgess or councillor of Strat- 
ford on September i, 1615, was churchwarden in 1626, leased for many- 
years of the Corporation a house in Henley Street, and played a promi- 
nent part in municipal affairs long after Shakespeare's Thomas Greene 
had left the town. 

2 The archives of the Stratford Corporation supply fuU information 
as to the course of the controversy ; and the official papers are sub- 
stantially supplemented by a surviving fragment of Thomas Greene's 
private diary (from Nov. 15, 1614, to Feb. 19, 1616-7). Of_ Greene's 
diary, which is in a crabbed and barely decipherable handwriting, one 
leaf is extant among the Wheler MSS._, belonging to the Shakespeare 
Birthplace Trustees, and three succeeding leaves are among the Cor- 
poration documents. The four leaves were reproduced in autotype, 
with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L. Scott and illustrative extracts from 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 475 

proved unwilling to identify himself with either side. He 
contented himself with protecting his own property from 
possible injury at the hands of the Combes, xhe appeal 
Personally Shakespeare had a twofold interest to Shake- 
in the matter. On the one hand he owned ^p^^"^^- 
the freehold of 127 acres which adjoined the threatened 
common fields. This land he had purchased of ' old ' 
John Combe and his uncle WilHam, of Warwick. On 
the other hand he was a joint owner with Thomas 
Greene, the town clerk, and many others, of the tithe- 
estate of Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton. 
The value of his freeholds could not be legally affected 
by the proposed enclosure.^ But too grasping a neigh- 
bour might cause him anxiety there. On the other 
hand, his profits as lessee of a substantial part of the 
tithe-estate might be imperilled if the Corporation were 
violently dispossessed of control of the tithe-paying 
land. 

At the outset of the controversy William Combe 
prudently approached Shakespeare through his agent 
Replingham, and sought to meet in a concilia- shake- 
tory spirit any objection to his design which speare's 
the dramatist might harbour on personal with the 
grounds. On October 28, 1614, 'articles' were ^gent*^^' 
drafted between Shakespeare and Replingham Oct. 28, 
indemnifying the dramatist and his heirs ^^^^' 
against any loss from the scheme of the enclosure. 
At Shakespeare's suggestion the terms of the agree- 
ment between himself and Combe's agent were de- 
Corporation records and valuable editorial comment by C. M. Ingleby, 
LL.D., in Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, 
Birmingham, 1885. Some interesting additional information has been 
gleaned from the Stratford records by Mrs. Stopes in Shakespeare's 
Environment, pp. 81-91 and 336-342. 

^ Thomas Greene drew up at the initial stage of the controversy a 
list of 'ancient freeholders in Old Stratford and Welcombe' who were 
interested parties. The first entry runs thus : ' Mr. Shakspeare, 4 yard 
land [i.e. roughly 127 acres], noe common nor ground beyond Gospel 
Bush, noe ground in Sandfield, nor none in Slow Hillfield beyond Bishop- 
ton, nor none in the enclosure beyond Bishopton. Sept. 5th, 1614.' 



476 - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

vised to cover the private interests of Thomas Greene, 
who, in his capacity of joint tithe-owner, was in much 
the same position as the dramatist. On November 12, 
the Council resolved that 'all lawful meanes shalbe 
used to prevent the enclosing that is pretended of part 
of the old town field,' and Greene proceeded to London 
to present a petition to the Privy Council. Four days 
later, Shakespeare reached the metropoHs on business 
of his own. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival 
Greene called upon the dramatist and talked over the 
local crisis. The dramatist was reassuring. He had 
(he said) discussed the plan of the enclosure with his 
son-in-law, John Hall, and they had reached the con- 
clusion that ' there will be nothyng done at all.' ^ Shake- 
speare avoided any expression of his personal 
Council's'^ sympathies. He would seem to have been 
letter to absent from Stratford till the end of the year, 
speare, and the Corporation chafed against his neu- 
Dec. 23, trality. On December 23, 1614, the Council in 
formal meeting drew up two letters to be 
delivered in London, one addressed to Shakespeare im- 
ploring his active aid in their behalf, and the other 
addressed to Mainwaring. Almost all the Councillors 
appended their signatures to each letter. Greene also 
on his own initiative sent to the dramatist 'a note of 
inconveniences [to the town] that would happen by the 
enclosure.' - But, as far as the extant evidence goes, 
Shakespeare remained silent. 

^ 'Jovis 17 No: [1614]. My Cosen Shakspeare commyng yesterday 
to towne, I went to see him howe he did ; he told me that they assured 
him they ment to inclose noe further then to gospell bushe, & so vpp 
straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to the fheld) to the gate in 
Clopton hedge & take in Salisburyes peece; and that they meane in 
Aprill to servey the Land, & then to gyve satisfaccion & not before, & 
he & Mr. Hall say they think there will be nothyng done at all' (Greene's 
Diary) . 

2 ' 23rd Dec. 1614. A Hall. Lettres wrytten, one to Mr. Manneryng, 
another to Mr. Shakspeare, with almost all the companyes hands to 
eyther : I alsoe wrytte of myself to my Cosen Shakspeare the coppyes 
of all our oathes made then, alsoe a not of the Inconvenyences wold 
grow by the Inclosure' (Greene's Diary). The minute book of the 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 477 

William Combe was in no yielding mood. In vain a 
deputation of six members of the Council laid their case 
before him. They were dismissed with contumely. The 
young landlord's arrogance stiffened the resistance of the 
Corporation. The Councillors were determined to 'pre- 
serve their inheritance ' ; ' they would not have it said 
in future time they were the men which gave way to the 
undoing of the town' ; ' all three fires were not so great 
a loss to the town as the enclosures would be.' Early 
next year (1615) labourers were employed by Combe to 
dig ditches round the area of the proposed enclosure 
and the townsmen attempted to fill them up. A riot 
followed. The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, 
was on the Warwickshire Assize, and in reply to a peti- 
tion from the Town Council he on March 27 declared 
from the bench at Warwick that Combe's conduct 
defied the law of the realm.^ The quarrel was not there- 
by stayed. But an uneasy truce followed. 

Town Council under date December 23 omits mention of the letters to 
Shakespeare and Mainwaring, although the minutes show that the 
controversy over the enclosures occupied the whole time of the Council 
as had happened at every meeting from September 23 onwards. No 
trace of the letter to Shakespeare survives ; but a contemporary copy, 
apparently in Greene's handwriting, of the letter to Mainwaring (doubt- 
less the counterpart of that to Shakespeare) is extant among the Strat- 
ford archives (Wheler Papers, vol. i. f . 80) ; it is printed in Greene's Diary, 
ed. Ingleby, Appendix ix. p. 15. The bailiff, Francis Smyth senior, and 
the Councillors, mention the recent 'casualties of fires' and the 'ruin of 
this borough,' and entreat Mainwaring 'in your Christian meditations to 
bethink you that such enclosure will tend to the great disabling of per- 
formance of those good meanings of that godly king [Edward VI, by 
whose charter of incorporation 'the common fields' passed to the town 
for the benefit of the poor] to the ruyne of this Borough wherein live 
above seven hundred poor which receive almes, whose curses and clamours 
will be poured out to God against the enterprise of such a thing.' 

^ '14 April 16 1 5. A Coppy of the Order made at Warwick Assises 
27 Marcij xiiio Jacobi R. : 

'Warr § Vpon the humble petition of the Baylyffe and Burgesses of 
Stratford uppon Avon, It was ordered at thes Assises that noe inclosure 
shalbe made within the parish of Stratforde, for that yt is agaynst the 
Lawes of the Realme, neither by Mr. Combe nor any other, untill they 
shall shewe cause at open assises to the Justices of Assise ; neyther that 
any of the Commons beinge aunciente greensworde shalbe plowed upp 
eyther by the sayd Mr. Combe or any other, untill good cause be lyke- 
wise shewed at open assises before the Justices of Assise ; and this order 



478 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In September 1615, during the lull in the conflict, the 
town clerk once again made record of Shakespeare's atti- 
tude. Greene's ungrammatical diary suppHes 
speare's the clumsy entry: 'Sept. [1615] W. Shak- 
statement, spcarcs tellyng J. Greene that I was not able 
to beare the encloseinge of Welcombe.' J. 
Greene was the town clerk's brother John, who had 
been solicitor to the Corporation since October 22, 
1612.^ It was with him that Shakespeare was repre- 
sented in conversation. Shakespeare's new statement 
amounted to nothing more than a reassertion of the 
continued hostility of Thomas Greene to William 
Combe's nefarious purpose.^ Shakespeare clearly re- 
is taken for preventjoige of tumultes and breaches of his Majesties 
peace; where of in this very towne of late upon their occasions there 
hadd lyke to have bene an evill begynnynge of some great mischief. 

'Edw. Coke.' 

^ Cal. Stratford Records, p. 102. 

2 The wording of the entry implies that Shakespeare told J[ohn] 
Greene that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to 
bear the enclosure. Those who would wish to regard Shakespeare as 
a champion of popular rights have endeavoured to interpret the 'I' 
in 'I was not able' as 'he.' Were that the correct reading, Shakespeare 
would be rightly credited with telling John Greene that he disliked the 
enclosure; but palseographers only recognise the reading 'I.' (Cf. 
Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, ed. Ingleby, 
1885, p. II.) In spite of Shakespeare's tacit support of William Combe 
in the matter of the enclosure, he would seem according to another entry 
in Greene's diary to have gently intervened amid the controversy in the 
interest of one of the young tyrant's debtors. Thomas Barber (or 
Barbor) , who was described as a ' gentleman ' of Shottery and was thrice 
bailiff of Stratford in 1578, 1586, and 1594, had become surety for a 
loan, which young Combe or his uncle John had made Mrs. Quiney, 
perhaps the widow of Richard. Mrs. Quiney failed to meet the liability, 
and application was made to Barber for repayment in the spring of 16 15. 
Barber appealed to Thomas Combe, William's brother, for some grace. 
But on April 7, 16 15 'W[illiam] Combe wiUed his brother to shew Mr. 
Barber noe favour and threatned him that he should be served upp to 
London within a fortnight (and so ytt fell out).' Barber's wife Joan 
was buried within the next few months (August 10, 161 5) and he fol- 
lowed her to the grave five days later. On September 5, Greene's diary 
attests that Shakespeare sent 'for the executors of Mr. Barber to agree 
as ys said with them for Mr. Barber's interest.' Shakespeare would 
seem to have been benevolently desirous of relieving Barber's estate 
from the pressure which Combe was placing upon it. (Cf. Stopes, 
Shakespeare's Environment, 1913, pp. 87 seq.) 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 479 

garded his agreement with Combe's agent as a bar to 
any active encouragement of the Corporation. 

The fight was renewed early next year when William 
Combe was chosen to serve as high sheriff of the county 
and acquired fresh leverage in his oppression ^^^ ^^^^^ 
of the townsfolk. He questioned the Lord men's 
Chief Justice's authority to run counter to his fg^^^P'^' 
scheme. Sir Edward Coke reiterated his warn- 
ing, and the country gentry at length ranged themselves 
on the popular side. A few months later Shakespeare 
passed away. Soon afterwards Combe was compelled 
to acknowledge defeat. Within two years of Shake- 
speare's death the Privy Council, on a joint report of 
the Master of the Rolls and Sir Edward Coke, con- 
demned without qualification Combe's course of action 
(February 14, 1618). Thereupon the disturber of the 
local peace sued for pardon. He received absolution on 
the easy terms of paying a fine of 4I. and of restoring 
the disputed lands to the precise condition in which 
they were left at his uncle's death.^ 

At the beginning of 1616, although Shakespeare pro- 
nounced himself to be, in conventional phrase, 'in per- 
fect health and memory,' his strength was Francis 
clearly failing, and he set about making his ^^^'["^ ^^^ 
will. Thomas Greene, who had recently acted speare's 
as his legal adviser, was on the point of resign- '*^'^i- 
ing his office of town clerk and of abandoning his re- 
lations with Stratford. Shakespeare now sought the 
professional services of Francis Collins, a solicitor, who 
had left the town some twelve years before, and was 
practising at Warwick. Collins, whose friends or 
cHents at Stratford were numerous, was much in the 

^ William Combe long survived his defeat, and for nearly half a cen- 
tury afterwards cultivated more peaceful relations with his neighbours. 
He is commonly identified with the William Combe who was elected to 
the Long Parliament (November 2, 1640) but whose election was at 
once declared void. He died at Stratford on January 30, i666-7,' at 
the age of eighty, and was buried in the parish church, where a monu- 
ment commemorates him with his wife, a son, and nine daughters. 



480 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

confidence of the Combe family. He was solicitor to 
John Combe's brother Thomas, the father of the heroes 
of the enclosure controversy, whose will he had witnessed 
at the College on December 22, 1608. Thomas Combe's 
brother, the wealthy John Combe, stood godfather to 
Colhns's son John, and gave in his will substantial 
proofs of his regard for Collins and his family.^ In 
employing Collins to make his will Shakespeare was 
loyal to distinguished local precedent. 

Shakespeare's will was written by Collins ^ and was 
ready for signature on January 25, but it was for the 
. time laid aside. Next month the poet suffered 
affairs domcstic auxiety owing to the threatened ex- 
^^^•~^P"'' communication of his younger daughter Judith 
and of his son-in-law Thomas Quiney on the 
ground of an irregularity in the celebration of their recent 
marriage in Stratford Church on February 10, 1615-6. 

John Ward, who was vicar of Stratford in Charles II's 
time and compiled a diary of local gossip, is responsible 
for the statement that Shakespeare later in this same 
spring entertained at New Place his two literary friends 
Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Jonson's old intimacy 
with Shakespeare continued to the last. The hospitality 
which Drayton constantly enjoyed at Clifford Chambers 
made him a familiar figure in Stratford. According to 
the further testimony of the vicar Ward, Shakespeare and 
his two guests Jonson and Drayton, when they greeted 
him at Stratford for the last time, 'had a merry meeting,' 
'but' (the diarist proceeds) ' Shakespeare itt seems drank 
too hard, for he died of a feavour there contracted.' 
Shakespeare may well have cherished Falstaff's faith in 
the virtues of sherris sack and have scorned 'thin pota- 

1 John Combe bequeathed sums of 10/. to both Francis Collins and 
his godson John Collins as well as 61. 13^. 4J. to Francis Collins's wife 
Susanna. Collins had two sons named John who were baptised in Strat- 
ford Church, one on June 2, 1601, the other on November 22, 1604. 
(See Baptismal Register.) The elder son John probably died in infancy. 

2 Collins's penmanship is established by a comparison of the will 
with admitted specimens of his handwriting among the Stratford ar- 
chives. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 481 

tions,' but there is no ground for imputing to him an 
excessive indulgence in 'hot and rebelhous liquors.' 
An eighteenth-century legend credited him with en- 
gaging in his prime in a prolonged and violent drinking 
bout at Bidford, a village in the near neighbourhood of 
Stratford, but no hint of the story was put on record 
before 1762, and it lacks credibility.^ 

The cause of Shakespeare's death is undetermined. 
Chapel Lane, which ran beside his house, was known as 
a noisome resort of straying pigs ; and the ^j^^ ^^g^_ 
insanitary atmosphere is likely to have prej- ing of 
udiced the failing health of a neighbouring spe^re's 
resident. During the month of March Shake- will, March 
speare's illness seemed to take a fatal turn. ^^' ^ ^ ' 
The will which had been drafted in the previous January 
was revised, and on March 25 ^ the document was finally 
signed by the dramatist in the presence of five neighbours. 

^ In the British Magazine, June 1762, a visitor to Stratford described 
how, on an excursion to the neighbouring village of Bidford, the host 
of the local inn, the White Lion, shewed him a crab tree, 'called Shake- 
speare's canopy ' and repeated a tradition that the poet had slept one 
night under that tree after engaging in a strenuous drinking match 
OTth the topers of Bidford. A Stratford antiquary, John Jordan, who 
invented a variety of Shakespearean myths, penned about 1770 an 
elaborate narrative of this legendary exploit, and credited Shakespeare 
on his recovery from his drunken stupor at Bidford with extemporising 
a crude rhyming catalogue of the neighbouring villages, in all of which 
he claimed to have proved his prowess as a toper. The doggerel, which 
long enjoyed a local vogue, ran : 

Piping Pebwerth, Dancing Marston, 
Haunted Hillborough and Hungry Grafton, 
With Dadging Exhall, Papist Wixford, 
Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford. 

The Bidford crab tree round which the story crystallised was sketched 
by Samuel Ireland in 1794 (see his Warwickshire Avon, 1795, p. 232), 
and by Charles Frederick Green in 1823 (see his Shakespeare's Crab- 
tree, 1857, p. 9). The tree was taken down in a decayed state in 1824. 
The shadowy legend was set out at length in W. H. Ireland's Confessions, 
1805, p. 34 and in the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, ii. pp. 500-2. It is 
also the theme of the quarto volume, Shakespeare's Crabtree and its Legend 
(with nine lithographic prints), by Charles Frederick Green, 1857. 

2 In the extant will the date of execution is given as ' vicesimo quinto 
die Martii'; but 'Martii' is an interlineation and is written above the 
word ' Januarii ' which is crossed through. 



482 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Three of the witnesses, who watched the poet write 
his name at the foot of each of the three pages of his will, 
The five were local friends near the testator's own age, 
witnesses, filling responsible positions in the town. At 
the head of the list stands the name of Francis Colhns, 
the sohcitor of Warwick, who a year later accepted an 
invitation to resettle at Stratford as Thomas Greene's 
successor in the office of town clerk, although death 
hmited his tenure of the dignity to six months.^ Collins's 
signature was followed by that of Julius Shaw, who after 
holding most of the subordinate municipal offices was 
now serving as bailiff or chief magistrate. He was 
long the occupant of a substantial house in Chapel 
Street, two doors off Shakespeare's residence.^ A third 
signatory of Shakespeare's will, Hamnet Sadler, whose 
Christian name was often written Hamlet, was brother 
of John Sadler who served twice as bailiff — in 1599 
and 161 2 — and he himself was often in London on 
business of the Corporation. His intimacy with Shake- 
speare was already close in 1585, when he stood god- 
father to Shakespeare's son Hamnet.^ The fourth wit- 

^ Collins's will dated September 20, 161 7, was proved by Francis his 
son and executor on November 10 following {P.C.C. Weldon, loi). He 
would appear to have died and been buried at Warwick. A successor 
as town-clerk of Stratford was appointed on October 18, 161 7 (Council 
Book B). 

^ Julius Shaw, who was baptised at Stratford in September 1571, 
was acquainted with Shakespeare from boyhood. Shakespeare's father 
John attested the inventory of the property of Julius Shaw's father Ralph 
at his death in 1591, when he was described as a ' wooldriver.' Julius 
Shaw's house in Chapel Street was the property of the Corporation, and 
he was in occupation of it in 1599, when the Corporation carefully de- 
scribed it in its survey of its tenements in the town (Cal. Stratford Rec- 
ords, p. 169). Julius Shaw was churchwarden of Stratford in 1603-4, 
chamberlain in 1609-10, and being successively a burgess and an alder- 
man was bailiff for a second time in 1628-9. A man of wealth, he was 
through his later years entitled 'gentleman' in local records. He was 
buried in Straford churchyard on June 24, 1629; his will is in the pro- 
bate registry at Worcester (Worcester Wills, Brit. Rec. Soc. ii. 13s). His 
widow Anne Boyes, whom he married on August 5, 1593, was buried at 
Stratford on October 26, 1630. 

* Hamnet Sadler died on October 26, 1624. He would seem to have 
had a family of seven sons and five daughters, but only five of these 



Shake- 
speare's 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 483 

ness of Shakespeare's will, Robert Whatcote, apparently 
a farmer, was a chief witness to the character of the 
poet's daughter when she brought the action for def- 
amation in 1 6 14. The fifth and last witness, John 
Robinson, occasionally figured as a Htigant in the local 
court of record.^ Of the five signatories Collins and 
Sadler received legacies under the will. 

On April 17, Shakespeare's only brother-in-law, 
William Hart, of Henley Street, who, according to the 
register, was in trade as a hatter, was buried 
in the parish churchyard. Six days later, on 
Tuesday, April 23, the poet himself died at death, 
New Place. He had just completed his fifty- i^il, and 
second year. On Thursday, April 25, he was burial, 
buried inside Stratford Church in front of the 
altar not far from the northern wall of the chancel. 
As part owner of the tithes, and consequently one of 
the lay-rectors, the dramatist had a right of interment 
in the chancel, and his local repute justified the supreme 
distinction of a grave before the altar .^ But a special 
peril attached to a grave in so conspicuous a situation. 
Outside in the churchyard stood the charnel-house or 
'bone-house' impinging on the northern wall of the 

survived childhood. His sixth son, born on February 5, 1597-8, was 
named William, probably after the dramatist. 

^ See p. 462 supra. Whatcote claimed damages in 2 Jac. i for the 
loss of six sheep which had been worried by the dogs of one Robert 
Suche {Cal. Stratford Records, p. 325). John Robinson brought actions 
for assault against two different defendants in 1608 and 1614 respectively 
{ibid. p. 211 and 231). Whether Whatcote or Robinson's home lay 
within the boundaries of Stratford is uncertain. No person named 
Whatcote figures in the Stratford parish registers, nor is there any entry 
which can be positively identified with the witness John Robinson. 
He should be in all probability distinguished from the John Robinson 
who was lessee of Shakespeare's house in Blackfriars. See p. 458 supra. 

^ A substantial fee seems to have attached to the privilege of burial 
in the chancel, and in the year before Shakespeare's death on December 4, 
161 5, the town council deprived John Rogers the vicar, whose 'faults 
and failings' excited much local complaint, of his traditional right to 
the money. At the date of Shakespeare's burial, the fee was made 
payable to the borough chamberlains, and was to be applied to the re- 
pair of the chancel and church {Cal. Stratford Records, p. 107). 



484 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

chancel, and there, according to a universal custom, 
bones which were dug from neighbouring graves lay in 
The mina- confused heaps. The scandal of such early and 
toryin- irregular exhumation was a crying grievance 
on the throughout England in the seventeenth century, 
gravestone. Hamlet bitterly voiced the prevailing dread. 
When he saw the gravedigger callously fling up the bones 
of his old playmate Yorick in order to make room for 
Ophelia's cofhn, the young Prince of Denmark exclaimed 
'Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play 
at loggats with 'em? Mine ache to think on 't.' 
Yorick's body had 'lain in the grave' twenty- three 
years. ^ It was to guard against profanation of the 
kind that Shakespeare gave orders for the inscription 
on his grave of the lines : 

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare 
To dig the dust enclosed heare ; 
Bleste be the man that spares these stones, 
And curst be he that moves my bones.^ 

According to one William Hall, who described a visit to 
Stratford in 1694,^ Shakespeare penned the verses in 
order to suit ' the capacity of clerks and sextons, for the 

1 Similarly Sir Thomas Brow^ne, in his Hydriotaphia, 1658, urged the 
advantage of crernation over a mode of burial which admitted the 
' tragicall abomination, of being knav'd out of our graves and of having 
our skulls made drinking bowls and our bones turned into pipes.' Ac- 
cording to Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary, the Royalist writer Sir John 
Berkenhead, in December 1679, gave directions in his will for his burial 
in the yard 'neer the Church of St. Martyn's in the Field' instead of in- 
side the church as was usual with persons of his status. 'His reason was 
because he sayd they removed the bodies out of the church' (Aubrey's 
Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 1898, i. 105). 

2 Several early transcripts of these lines, which were first printed in 
Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656, are extant. The Warwick- 
shire antiquary Dugdale visited Stratford-on-Avon on July 4, 1634, and 
his transcript of the lines which he made on that day is still preserved 
among his manuscript collections at Merevale. In 1673 a tourist named 
Robert Dobyns visited the church and copied this inscription as well as 
that on John Combe's tomb (see pp. 470-1 supra) . The late Bertram Do- 
bell, the owner of Dobyns' manuscript, described it in The Athenczum, 
January 19, 1901. 

3 Hall's letter was published as a quarto pamphlet at London in 1884, 
from the original, now in the Bodleian Warary, Oxford. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 485 

most part a very ignorant set of people.' Had this 
curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, the sexton 
would not have hesitated in course of time to remove 
Shakespeare's dust to 'the bone-house.' As it was, the 
grave was made seventeen feet deep, and was never 
opened, even to receive his wife and daughters, although 
(according to the diary of one Dowdall, another seven- 
teenth-century visitor to Stratford) they expressed a 
desire to be buried in it. In due time his wife was 
buried in a separate adjoining grave on the north side of 
his own, while three graves on the south side afterwards 
received the remains of the poet's elder daughter, of 
her husband, and of the first husband of their only 
child, the dramatist's granddaughter. Thus a row of 
five graves in the chancel before the altar ultimately bore 
witness to the local status of the poet and his family. 
Shakespeare's will, the first draft of which was drawn 
up before January 25, 1615-6, received many inter- 
lineations and erasures before it was signed in 
the ensuing March. The religious exordium 
is in conventional phraseology, and gives no clue to 
Shakespeare's personal religious opinions, ^j^^ 
What those opinions precisely were, we have religious 
neither the means nor the warrant for dis- ^^o""^^^""- 
cussing. The plays furnish many ironical references 
to the Puritans and their doctrines, but we may dismiss 
as idle gossip the irresponsible report that 'he dyed a 
papist,' which the Rev. Richard Davies, rector of 
Sapperton, first put on record late in the seventeenth 
century.^ That he was to the last a conforming member 
of the Church of England admits of no question. 

1 Richard Davies, who died in 1708, inserted this and other remarks 
in some brief adversaria respecting Shakespeare, which figured in the 
manuscript collections of William Fulman, the antiquary, which are 
in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. For the main argu- 
ment in favour of Davies's assertion see Father H. S. Bowden's The 
Religion of Shakespeare, chiefly from the writings of Richard Simpson, 
London, 1899. A biography of Shakespeare curiously figures in the im- 
posing Catholic work of reference Die Convertiten seit der Reformation 
nach ihrem Leben tmd ihren Schriften dargestelU von Dr. Andreas Raess, 



486 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The name of Shakespeare's wife was omitted from the 
original draft of the will, but by an interlineation in the 
Bequest to final draft she received his ' second best bed 
his wife. ^j|-j^ i]^Q furnitur.' No other bequest was 
made her. It was a common practice of the period to 
specify a bedstead or other defined article of household 
furniture as a part of a wife's inheritance. Nor was it 
unusual to bestow the best bed on another member of 
the family than the wife, leaving her only 'the second 
best,' ^ but no will except Shakespeare's is forthcoming 
in which a bed forms the wife's sole bequest. There is 
nothing to show that Shakespeare had set aside any 
property under a previous settlement or jointure with 
a view to making independent provision for his widow. 
Her right to a widow's dower • — i.e. to a third share 
for Hfe in freehold estate — was not subject to testa- 
mentary disposition, but Shakespeare had taken steps 
to prevent her from benefiting, at any rate to the full 
extent, by that legal arrangement. He had barred her 
dower in the case of his latest purchase of freehold 
estate, viz. the house at Blackfriars.^ Such procedure 

Bischof von Strassburg (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1866-80, 13 vols, and 
index vol.), vol. xiii. 1880, pp. 372-439. 

^ Thomas Combe of Stratford (father of Thomas and William of the 
enclosure controversy) while making adequate provision for his wife in 
his wUl (dated December 22, 1608), specifically withheld from her his 
'best bedstead . . . with the best bed and best furniture thereunto be- 
longing ' ; this was bequeathed to his elder son William to the exclusion 
of his widow. (See Thomas Combe's will, P.C.C. Dorset 13.) 

2 The late Charles Elton, Q.C., was kind enough to give me a legal 
opinion on this point. He wrote to me on December 9, 1897 : 'I have 
looked to the authorities with my friend Mr. Herbert Mackay, and 
there is no doubt that Shakespeare barred the dower.' Mr. Mackay's 
opinion is couched in the following terms : ' The conveyance of the 
Blackfriars estate to William Shakespeare in 16 13 shows that the es- 
tate was conveyed to Shakespeare, Johnson, Jackson, and Hemming 
as joint tenants, and therefore the dower of Shakespeare's wife would 
be barred unless he were the survivor of the four bargainees.' That 
was a remote contingency which did not arise, and Shakespeare always 
retained the power of making 'another settlement when the trustees 
were shrinking.' Thus the bar was for practical purposes perpetual, 
and disposes of Mr. Halliwell-PhiUipps's assertion that Shakespeare's 
wife was entitled to dower in one form or another from all his real estate. 



r , TG 




'4^^ 


si 


sl^i^ 




THE CLOSE OF LIFE 487 

is pretty conclusive proof that he had the intention of 
excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions 
after his death. But, however plausible the theory 
that his relations with her were from first to last wanting 
in sympathy, it is improbable that either the slender 
mention of her in the will or the barring of her dower 
was designed by Shakespeare to make public his in- 
difference or disHke. Local tradition subsequently 
credited her with a wish to be buried in his grave ; and 
her epitaph proves that she inspired her daughters 
with genuine affection. Probably her ignorance of 
affairs and the infirmities of age (she was past sixty) 
combined to unfit her in the poet's eyes for the control 
of property, and, as an act of ordinary prudence, he 
committed her to the care of his elder daughter, who 
inherited, according to such information as is accessible, 
some of his own shrewdness, and had a capable adviser 
in her husband. 

This elder daughter, Susanna Hall, was, under the 
terms of the will, to become mistress of New Place, 
and practically of all the poet's estate. She . 

received (with remainder to her issue in strict 
entail) New Place, the two messuages or tenements in 
Henley Street (subject to the life interest of her aunt 
Mrs. Hart), the cottage and land in Chapel Lane which 
formed part of the manor of Rowington, and indeed all 
the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford, 
together with the dramatist's interest in the tithes and 
the house in Blackfriars, London. Moreover, Mrs. Hall 
and her husband were appointed executors and residuary 
legatees, with full rights over nearly all the poet's house- 
hold furniture and personal belongings. To their 
only child, the testator's granddaughter or 'niece,' 
Elizabeth Hall, was bequeathed the poet's plate, with 
the exception of his broad silver and gilt bowl, which 

Cf . Davidson on Conveyancing ; Littleton, sect. 45 ; Coke upon Littleton, 
ed. Hargrave, p. 379 b, note i. See also pp. 456-7 supra and p. 491 n. i 
infra. 



488 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

was reserved for his younger daughter, Judith. To 
his younger daughter he also left 150/. in money, of 
which 100/., her marriage portion, was to be paid within 
a year, and another 150^. to be paid to her if ahve three 
years after the date of the will. Ten per cent, interest 
was to be allowed until the money was paid. Of the 
aggregate amount the sum of 50^. was specified to be 
the consideration due to Judith for her surrender of her 
interest in the cottage and land in Chapel Lane which 
was held of the manor of Rowington. To the poet's 
sister, Joan Hart, whose husband, William Hart, pre- 
deceased the testator by only six days, he left, besides 
a contingent reversionary interest in Judith's pecuniary 
legacy, his wearing apparel, 20/. in money, and a Kfe 
interest in the Henley Street property, with 5^. for each 
of her three sons, Wilham, Thomas, and Michael. 

Shakespeare extended his testamentary benefactions 
beyond his domestic circle, and thereby pfoved the wide 
Legacies range of his social ties. Only one bequest 
to friends, -^^g appHed to charitable uses. The sum of 
10/. was left to the poor of Stratford. Eight fellow 
townsmen received marks of the dramatist's regard. 
To Mr. Thomas Combe, younger son of Thomas Combe 
of the College, and younger nephew of his friend John 
Combe, Shakespeare left his sword — possibly by way 
of ironical allusion to the local strife in which the legatee 
had borne a part.^ No mention was made of Thomas's 
elder brother WilHam, who was still active^ urging his 
claim to enclose the common land of the town. The 
large sum of 13/. 6s. Sd. was allotted to Francis Collins, 
who was described in the will as ' of the borough of War- 

^ All effort to trace Shakespeare's sword has failed. Its legatee, 
Mr. Thomas Combe, who died at Stratford in July 1657, aged 68, directed 
his executors, by his will dated June 20, 1656, to convert all his personal 
property into money, and to lay it out in the purchase of lands, to be 
settled on William Combe, the eldest son of a cousin, John Combe, of 
Alvechurch, in the county of Worcester, Gent., and his heirs male with 
remainder to his two brothers successively {Variorum Shakespeare, 
ii. 604 n.). 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 489 

wick, gent.' ; within a year he was to be called to Strat- 
ford as town clerk. A gift of xxs. in gold was bestowed 
on the poet's godson, William Walker, now in his ninth 
year. Four adult Stratford friends, Hamnet Sadler, 
WilHam Reynoldes, gent., Anthony Nash, gent., and Mr. 
John Nash, were each given 26s. Sd. wherewith to buy 
memorial rings. All were men of local influence, al- 
though William Reynoldes and the Nash brothers were 
of rather better status than the dramatist's friend from 
boyhood Hamnet Sadler, a witness to the will. William 
Reynoldes was a local landowner in his thirty-third 
year. His father, 'Mr. Thomas Reynoldes, gent.,' of 
Old Stratford, who had died on September 8, 1613, 
enjoyed heraldic honours ; and John Combe, who de- 
scribed Reynoldes's mother as his 'cousin,' had made 
generous bequests of land or money to all members 
of the family and even to the servants. William Rey- 
noldes inherited from John Combe two large plots of 
land on the Evesham Road to the west of the town, 
which were long familiarly known as ' Salmon Jowl ' 
and 'Salmon Tail' respectively.^ Anthony Nash was 
the owner of much land at Welcombe, and had a share 
in the tithes.^ His brother John was less affluent, but 
made at his death substantial provision for his family. 
A younger generation of the poet's family continued 
his own intimacy with the Nashes. Thomas, a younger 
son of Anthony Nash, who was baptised on June 20, 
1593, became in 1626 the first husband of Shakespeare's 
granddaughter, EHzabeth Hall. 

Another legatee, Thomas Russell, alone of all the 
persons mentioned in the will, bore the dignified desig- 

^ See Cal. Stratford Records. William Reynoldes married Frances 
De Bois of London, described as a Frenchwoman (see Visitation of 
Warwickshire, 1619, Harl. Soc, p. 243). He was buried in Stratford 
Church on March 6, 1632-3. 

2 Anthony Nash was buried in Stratford on November 18, 1622. A 
younger son was christened John on October 15, 1598, after his uncle 
John, Shakespeare's legatee. The latter's will dated November 5, 1623, 
was proved by his sole executor and son-in-law William Home just a 
fortnight later {P.C.C. Swann 122). 



490 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

nation of 'Esquire.' He received the sum of 5/., and 
was also nominated one of the two overseers, Francis 
Thomas ColHns being the other. There is no proof in 
Russell, the local records that Russell was a resident 
squire. -^^ Stratford/ and he was in all probabiHty a 
London friend. Shakespeare had opportunities of meet- 
ing in London one Thomas Russell, who in the dram- 
atist's later Hfe enjoyed a high reputation there as a 
metallurgist, obtaining patents for new methods of ex- 
tracting metals from the ore. For near a decade before 
Shakespeare's death Russell would seem to have been in 
personal relations with the poet Michael Drayton. Both " 
men enjoyed the patronage of Sir David Murray of 
Gorthy, who was a poetaster as well as controller of the 
household of Henry, Price of Wales ; in his capacity of 
minor poet, Murray received a handsome tribute in 
verse from Drayton. As early as 1608 Francis Bacon 
was seeking Thomas Russell's acquaintance on the two- 
fold ground of his scientific ingenuity and his social in- 
fluence.^ Shakespeare probably owed to Drayton an 
acquaintanceship with Russell, which Bacon aspired to 
share. 

More interesting is it to note that three 'fellows' or 
colleagues of his theatrical career in London, were com- 
Thebe- memorated by Shakespeare in his will in pre- 
quests to cisely the same fashion as his four chief friends 
at Stratford, — Sadler, Reynoldes, and the two 
Nashes. The actors John Heminges, Richard Burbage, 
and Henry Condell also received 26s. Sd. apiece where- 
with to buy memorial rings. All were veterans in the 
theatrical service, and acknowledged leaders of the 
theatrical profession, to whose personal association with 

^ The dramatist's father John Shakespeare occasionally co-operated 
in local affairs with one Henry Russell, who held for a time the humble 
ofl&ce of Serjeant of the mace in the local court of record. Henry Russell 
married Elizabeth Perry in 1559 and may have been father of Thomas 
Russell, although the latter's name is absent from the baptismal register, 
and his status makes the suggestion improbable. 

^ Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1610-1624; Spedding's Life and Letters 
of Bacon, iv. 23, 63. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 491 

the dramatist his biography furnishes testimony at 
every step. When their company, of which Shakespeare 
had been a member, received a new patent on March 27, 
16 1 9, the Hst of patentees was headed by the three actors 
whom Shakespeare honoured in his will. 

While 'Francis Collins, gent.,' and 'Thomas Russell, 
esquire,' were overseers of the will, Shakespeare's son-in- 
law and his daughter, John and Susanna Hall, overseers 
were the executors. The will was proved in and 
London by Hall and his wife on June 22, ^^^'^^^°^^- 
1 616. Most of the landed property was retained by the 
beneficiaries during their lifetime in accordance with 
Shakespeare's testamentary provision.^ Hall and his 
wife only alienated one portion of the poet's estate ; 
they parted to the Corporation with Shakespare's in- 
terest in the tithes- in August 1624 for 400/., reserving 
'two closes' which they had lately leased 'to Mr. Wil- 
Ham Combe, esquier.' 

Thus Shakespeare, according to the terms of his will, 
died in command of an aggregate sum of 350/. in money 
in addition to personal belongings of realisable 
value, and an extensive real estate the greater speare's 
part of which he had purchased out of his theatrical 

Jr J. SJlcLrCS. 

savings at a cost of 1,200/. But it was rare for 
wills of the period to enumerate in full detail the whole 
of a testator's possessions. A complete inventory was 
reserved for the 'inquisitio post mortem,' which in 
Shakespeare's case, despite a search at Somerset House, 
has not come to light. The absence from the dramatist's 
will of any specific allusion to books is no proof that he 
left none ; they were doubtless included by his lawyer in 

^ On February 10, 1617-8, John Jackson, John Hemynge of London, 
gentlemen, and WiUiam Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, whom 
Shakespeare had made nominal co-owners or trustees of the Blackfriars 
estate, made over their formal interest to John Greene of Clement's Inn, 
gent. (Thomas Greene's brother), and Matthew Morris, of Stratford, 
gent., with a view to facilitating the disposition of the property 'accord- 
ing to the true intent and meaning' of Shakespeare's last will and testa- 
ment. The house passed to the Halls, subject to the lawful interest of 
the present lessee, John Robinson (Halliwell-PhiUipps, ii. 36-41). 



492 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the comprehensive entry of 'goodes' and 'chattells' 
which fell, with the rest of his residuary estate, to his 
elder daughter and to John Hall, her well-educated 
husband. When Hall died at New Place in 1635, a 
'study of books' was among the contents of his house.^ 
There is every reason to believe, too, that Shakespeare 
retained till the end of his life his theatrical shares — a 
fourteenth share in the Globe and a seventh share in the 
Blackfriars — which his will again fails to mention. 
Such an omission is paralleled in the testaments of several 
of his acting colleagues and friends. Neither Augustine 
Phillips {d. 1605), Richard Burbage {d. 1619), nor 
Henry Condell {d. 1627) made any testamentary refer- 
ence to their theatrical shares, although substantial 
holdings passed in each case to their heirs. John 
Heminges,^ one of the three actors who are commemorated 
by bequests in Shakespeare's will, was the business 
manager of the dramatist's company. Shortly after 
Shakespeare's death Heminges largely increased his 
proprietary rights in both the Globe and Blackfriars 
theatres. There is little question that he acquired of 
the residuary legatees (Susanna and John Hall) Shake- 
speare's shares in both houses. At his death in 1630, 
Heminges owned as many as four shares in each of the 
two theatres. It is reasonable to regard his large 
theatrical estate as incorporating Shakespeare's theatri- 
cal property.^ 

Exhaustive details of the estates of Jacobean actors 

^ See p. 506 infra. 

2 The practice varied. In the wills of Thomas Pope {d. 1603), John 
Heminges {d. 1630), and John Underwood {d. 1624) specific bequest is 
made of their theatrical shares. 

* See p. 305 n. i snpra. The capitalised value of theatrical shares 
rarely rose much above the annual income. The leases of the land on 
which the theatre stood were usually short, and the prices of shares 
were bound to fall as the leases neared extinction. In 1633, when the 
leases of the sites of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres had only 
a few years to run, three shares in the Globe and two in the Blackfriars 
were sold for no more than an aggregate sum of 506Z. John Hall and 
his wife may well have sold to Heminges Shakespeare's theatrical in- 
terest for some 300?. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 493 

are rarely available. The provisions of their wills offer 
as a rule vaguer information than in Shakespeare's 
case. But the co-ordinated evidence shows 
that, while Shakespeare died a richer man than of contem- 
most members of his profession, his wealth was p°[q^Y 
often equalled and in a few instances largely- 
exceeded. The actor Thomas Pope, who died in 1603, 
made pecuniary bequests to an amount exceeding 340/. 
and disposed besides of theatrical shares and much real 
estate. Henry Condell, who died in 1627, left annuities 
of 31/. and pecuniary legacies of some 70/. in addition to 
extensive house property in London and his theatrical 
shares. Burbage, whose will was nuncupative, was 
popularly reckoned to be worth at his death (in March 
1 6 18-9) 300/. in land, apart from personal and theatrical 
property. A far superior standard of affluence was 
furnished by the estate of the actor Edward Alleyn, 
Burbage's chief rival, who died on November 25, 1626. 
In his lifetime he purchased an estate at Dulwich for 
some 10,000^. in money of his own time, and he built 
there the College 'of God's Gift' which he richly en- 
dowed with land elsewhere. At the same time Alleyn 
disposed by his will of a sum of money approaching 
2000/. and made provision out of an immense real es- 
tate for the building and endowment of thirty alms- 
houses. Alleyn speculated in real property with great 
success ; but his professional earnings were always 
considerable. Shakespeare's wealth was modest when 
it is compared with Alleyn's. Yet Alleyn's financial 
experience proves the wide possibihties of fortune 
which were open to a contemporary actor who possessed 
mercantile aptitude.^ 

A humble poetic admirer, Leonard Digges, in com- 
mendatory verses before the First Folio of 1623, wrote 
that Shakespeare's works would be alive when 

Time dissolves thy Stratford monument. 

^ For Alleyn's will see Collier's Alleyn Papers, pp. xxi-xxvi, and for the 
wills of many other contemporary actors see Collier's Lives of the Actors. 



494 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

It is clear that before the year 1623, possibly some 
three years earlier, the monument in Shakespeare's 
^jjg honour, which is still affixed to the north 

Stratford wall of the chancel overlooking his grave, 
monument, ^as placed in Stratford Church. The memorial 
was designed and executed in Southwark within a stone's 
throw of the Globe theatre, and it thus constitutes a 
material link between Shakespeare's professional Hfe 
on the Bankside and his private career at Stratford. 
'Gheeraert Janssen,' a native of Amsterdam, settled 
in the parish of St. Thomas, Southwark, early in 1567 
and under the Anglicised name of ' Garret Johnson' made 
a high reputation as a tombmaker, forming a clientele 
extending far beyond his district of residence. In 1591 
he received the handsome sum of 200/. for designing and 
erecting the elaborate tombs of the brothers Edward 
Manners, third Earl of Rutland, and John Manners, 
fourth Earl, which were set up in the church at Bottes- 
ford, Leicestershire, the family burying-place.^ The 
sculptor died in St. Saviour's parish, Southwark, in 
August 161 1, dividing his estate between his widow 
Mary and two of his sons, Garret and Nicholas. They 
had chiefly helped him in his tombmaking business, 
and they carried it on after his death with much of his 
success. Shakespeare's tomb came from the Southwark 
stone-yard, while it was controlled by the younger 
Garret Johnson and his brother Nicholas.^ Nicholas 

1 Garret Johnson's work at Bottesford is fully described by Lady 
Victoria Manners in 'The Rutland Monuments in Bottesford Church,' 
Art Journal, 1903, pp. 288-9. See also Rutland Papers {Hist. MSS. 
Comnt. Rep.), iv. 397-9, where elaborate details are given of the con- 
veyance of the tombs from London; EUer's Hist, of Belvoir Castle, 1841, 
pp. 369 seq. 

^ The will of Garret Johnson, 'tombmaker' of St. Saviour's parish, 
dated July 24, 1611, and proved July 3, 1612, is at Somerset House 
{P.C.C. Penner 66). His burial is entered in St. Saviour's parish register 
in August 161 1. The return of aliens, dated in 1593 credits him with 
five sons of ages ranging between 22 and 4, and with a daughter aged 14; 
but only two sons are mentioned in his will, which was apparently made 
in haste on the point of death. (Cf . Kirk's ' Return of Aliens,' Huguenot 
Soc. Proceedings, iii. 445.) Dugdale in his diary noted under the year 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 495 

was by far the better artist of the two. He continued 
his father's association with the Rutland family, and 
designed and executed in 1618-9 the splendid tomb 
which commemorated Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rut- 
land, and his Countess (Sir PhiHp Sidney's daughter) at 
Bottesford.^ The order was given by the sixth Earl 
of Rutland (brother of the fifth Earl) , with whom Shake- 
speare was in personal relations in 16 13. The dramatist 
had shared the Earl's favour with the sculptor. Shake- 
speare's monument was designed on far simpler lines 
than this impressive Bottesford tomb, and the main 
features suggest by their crudity the hand of Nicholas's 
brother Garret, though some of the subsidiary ornament 
is identical with that of Nicholas's work at Bottesford 
Church and attests his partial aid. One or other of the 
Johnsons had lately, too, provided for St. Saviour's 
Church (now Southwark Cathedral) a tomb of a design 
very similar to that of Shakespeare's, in honour of 
one John Bingham, a prominent Southwark parishioner, 
and saddler to Queen Elizabeth and James I.^ 

The poet's monument in Stratford Church was in 
tablet form and was coloured, in accordance with con- 
temporary practice. It presents a central arch flanked 

1653 that Shakespeare's and Combe's monuments in Stratford Church 
were both the work of 'one Gerard Johnson' {Diary, ed. Hamper, 1827, 
p. 299), but the editor of the diary knew nothing of the younger Garret, 
and by identifying the sculptor of Shakespeare's tomb with the elder 
Garret propounded a puzzle which is here solved for the first time. 

^ Lady Victoria Manners' 'Rutland Monuments' in Art Jo'urnal, 
1903, pp. 335 seq., and Rutland Papers, iv. pp. 517 and 519. 

2 Probably Garret and Nicholas Johnson designed the effigies in South- 
wark Cathedral of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes {d. 1626), and of John 
Treherne {d. 16 18), gentleman porter to James I, together with that of 
his wife Margaret {d. 1645). See W. Thompson's Southwark Cathedral, 
19 10, pp. 78, 121. To the same Johnson family doubtless belonged 
Bernard Janssen or Johnson, who was brought to England in 1613 from 
Amsterdam by the distinguished English monumental sculptor Nicholas 
Stone, and settling in Southwark helped Stone in much important work. 
Together they executed in 161 5 Thomas Sutton's tomb at the Charter- 
house and subsequently Sir Nicholas Bacon's tomb in Redgrave Church, 
Suffolk. See A. E. Bullock's Some Sculptural Works of Nicholas Stone, 
1908. 



496 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

by two Corinthian columns which support a cornice and 
entablature.^ Within the arch was set a half-length 
figure of the poet in relief. The dress consists of 
esign. ^ scarlet doublet, slashed and loosely buttoned, 
with white cuffs and a turned-down or falling white collar. 
A black gown hangs loosely about the doublet from 
the shoulders. The eyes are of a light hazel and the hair 
and beard auburn. The hands rest upon a cushion, the 
right hand holding a pen as in the act of writing and the 
left hand resting on a scroll. Over the centre of the 
entablature is a block of stone, on the surface of which 
the poet's arms and crest are engraved, and on a ledge 
above rests a full-sized skull. These features closely 
resemble the like details in Nicholas Johnson's tomb of 
the fifth earl of Rutland in Bottesford Church. The 
stone block is flanked by two small seated nude figures ; 
the right holds a spade in the right hand, while the 
other figure places the Hke hand on a skull lying at its 
side and from the left hand droops a torch reversed with 
the flame extinguished. Similar standing figures with 
identical emblematic objects surmount the outer columns 
of the Rutland monument, and Nicholas Johnson the 
designer of that tomb explained in his 'plot' (or descrip- 
tive plan) that the one figure was a 'portraiture of Labor,' 
and 'the other of Rest.' ^ Beneath the arch which 

^ The pillars were of marble, the ornaments were of alabaster, and 
the rest of the fabric was of stone which has been variously described as 
a 'soft bluish grey stone,' a 'loose freestone,' a 'soft whitish grey lime- 
stone' (Mrs. Stopes, Shakespeare's Environment, pp. 11 7-8). 

2 Nicholas Johnson's 'plot' of his Rutland monument which is dated 
28 May (apparently 161 7) is extant among the family archives at Bel- 
voir and is printed in full by Lady Victoria Manners in Art Journal, 
1903, pp. 335-6. Like figures surmount the outer columns of the Sutton 
monument at the Charterhouse, and they adorn, as on Shakespeare's 
tomb, the cornices of Sir William Pope's monument in Wroxton Church 
(1633) and of Robert Kelway's tomb in Exton Church. These three 
monuments were designed by the English sculptor Nicholas Stone, whose 
coadjutor Bernard Janssen or Johnson of Southwark was possibly re- 
lated to Nicholas and Garret Johnson, and he may have exchanged sug- 
gestions with his kinsmen. The earliest sketch of the Shakespeare 
monument is among Dugdale's MSS. at Merevale, and is dated 1634. 
Dugdale's drawing is engraved in his Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 497 

holds the dramatist's effigy is a panel which bears this 
inscription : 

Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, 
Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet. 

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast? 
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast 
Within this monument ; Shakspeare with whome 
Quick nature dide ; whose name doth deck ys tombe 
Far more then cost ; sith all yt he hath writt 
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt. 

Obiit ano. doi 1616 ^tatis 53 Die 23 Ap. 

The authorship of the epitaph is undetermined. It 
was doubtless by a London friend who belonged to 
the same circle as William Basse or Leonard Thein- 
Digges, whose elegies are on record else- scription. 
where. The writer was no superior to them in poetic 
capacity. The opening Latin distich with its compari- 
son of the dramatist to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil 
echoes a cultured convention of the day, while the suc- 
ceeding EngUsh stanza embodies a conceit touching art's 
supremacy over nature which is characteristic of the 
spirit of the Renaissance. -"^ Whatever their defects of 
style, the Hnes presented Shakespeare to his fellow- 
townsmen as the greatest man of letters of his time. 
According to the elegist, Hterature by all other hving 
pens was, at the date of the dramatist's death, only fit 
to serve ' all that he hath writ ' as ' page ' or menial. In 
Stratford Church, Shakespeare was acclaimed the master- 
poet, and all other writers were declared to be his servants. 

It differs in many details, owing to inaccurate draughtsmanship, from 
the present condition of the monument. For discussion of the varia- 
tions and for the history of the renovations which the monument is 
known to have undergone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
see pp. 523-5 infra. 

1 The epitaph on the tomb of the painter Raphael in the Pantheon 
at Rome, by the cultivated Cardinal Pietro Bembo, adumbrates the 
words ' with whom quick nature dide ' in Shakespeare's epitaph : 

Hie ille est Raphael, metuit qui sospite vinci 
Rerum magna parens, et moriente mori 

(i.e. Here lies the famous Raphael, in whose lifetime great mother Nature feared 
to be outdone, and at whose death feared to die). 

2 K 



498 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Some misgivings arose in literary circles soon after 
Shakespeare's death, as to whether he had received 
appropriate sepulture. Geoffrey Chaucer, the greatest 
EngHsh poet of pre-Elizabethan times, had been accorded 
a grave in Westminster Abbey in October 1400. It 
was association with the royal household rather than 
poetic eminence which accounted for his interment in 
the national church. But in 1551 the services to poetry 
of the author of 'The Canterbury Tales' were directly 
acknowledged by the erection of a monument near his 
grave in the south transept of the Abbey. When the 
sixteenth century drew to a close, Chaucer's growing 
fame as the father of Enghsh poetry suggested the 
propriety of burying within the shadow of his tomb the 
eminent poets of his race. On January 16, 1598-9, 
Edmund Spenser, who died in King Street, Westminster, 
and had apostrophised 'Dan Chaucer' as 'well of Enghsh 
undefiled,' was buried near Chaucer's tomb, and the 
occasion was made a demonstration in honour of 
Shake- ^is poetic faculty. Spenser's 'hearse was 
speareand attended by poets, and mournful elegies and 
mirfster pocms with the peus that wrote them were 
Abbey. thrown into his tomb.' ^ Some seven weeks 
before Shakespeare died, there passed away (on March 
6, 161 5-6) the dramatist, Francis Beaumont, the partner 
of John Fletcher. Beaumont was the second Ehzabethan 
poet to be honoured with burial at Chaucer's side. The 
news of Shakespeare's death reached London after the 
dramatist had been laid to rest amid his own people at 
Stratford. But men of letters raised a cry of regret 
that his ashes had not joined those of Chaucer, Spenser, 
and Beaumont in Westminster Abbey. WilKam Basse, 
an enthusiastic admirer, gave the sentiment poetic 
expression in sixteen lines which would seem to have 
been penned some three or four years after Shakespeare's 
interment at Stratford. The dramatist's monument in 
the church there was already erected, and the elegist 

^ Camden's Annals of Elizabeth, 1688 ed. p. 565. 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 499 

in his peroration accepted the accomphshed fact, 
acknowledging the fitness of giving Shakespeare's 
unique genius 'unmolested peace' beneath its own 
'carved marble,' apart from fellow poets who had no 
claim to share his glory.^ An echo of Basse's argument 
was impressively sounded by a more famous elegist. 
In his splendid greeting of his dead friend prefixed to 
the First FoHo of 1623, Ben Jonson reconciled himself 
to Shakespeare's exclusion from the Abbey where lay 
the remains of Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont, in the 
great apostrophe : 

My Shakespeare, rise ! I will not lodge thee by 
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie 
A little further to make thee a room. 
Thou art a monument without a tomb. 
And art alive still, while thy book doth live 
And we have wits to read and praise to give. 

1 Basse's elegy runs thus in the earliest extant version : 

Renowned Spencer lye a thought more nye 
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lye 
A little neerer Spenser, to make roome 
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe. 
To lodge all fowre in one bed make a shift 
Vntill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift 
Betwixt ys day and y* by Fate be slayne, 
For whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe. 
If your precedency in death doth barre 
' A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher, 

Vnder this carued marble of thine owne, 
Sleepe, rare Tragcedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone ; 
Thy immolested peace, vnshared Caue, 
Possesse as Lord, not Tenant, of thy Graue, 

That vnto us & others it may be 

Honor hereafter to be layde by thee. 

There are many 17th century manuscript versions of Basse's lines. 
The earliest, probably dated 1620, is in the British Museum (Lansdowne 
MSS. 777, f. 676), and though it is signed William Basse, is in the hand- 
writing of the pastoral poet William Browne, who was one of Basse's 
friends. It was first printed in Donne's Poems, 1633, but was withdrawn 
in the edition of 1635. Donne doubtless possessed a manuscript copy, 
which accidentally found its way into manuscripts of his own verses. 
Basse's poem reappeared signed 'W. B.' among the prefatory verses 
to Shakespeare's Poems, 1640, and without author's name in Witts' 
Recreations, edd. 1640 and 1641, and among the additions to Poems by 
Francis Beaumont, 1652. (See Basse's Poetical Works, ed. Warwick 
Bond, pp. 113 seq. ; and Century of Praise, pp. 136 seq.) 



500 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Apart from Spenser and Beaumont, only two poetic con- 
temporaries, Shakespeare's friends Michael Drayton and 
Ben Jonson, received the honour, which the dramatist 
was denied, of interment in the national church. Dray- 
ton at the end of 163 1 and Ben Jonson on August 16, 
1637, were both buried within a few paces of the graves 
of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont.^ Although Shake- 
speare slept in death far away, Basse's poem is as con- 
vincing as any of the extant testimonies, to the national 
fame which was allotted Shakespeare by his own genera- 
tion of poets. 

High was the place in the ranks of literature which 
contemporary authors accorded Shakespeare's genius 
Personal and its glorious fruit. Yet the impressions 
character, which his personal character left on the minds 
of his associates were those of simplicity, modesty, and 
straightforwardness. At the opening of Shakespeare's 
career Chettle wrote of his 'civil demeanour' and of 
'his uprightness of deahng which argues his honesty.' 
In 1 60 1 — when near the zenith of his fame — he was 
apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shakespeare' in the play 
of 'The Return from Parnassus,' and that adjective was 
long after associated with his name. In 1604 Anthony 
Scoloker, in the poem called 'Daiphantus,' bestowed on 
him the epithet 'friendly.' After the close of his career 
Ben Jonson wrote of him: 'I loved the man and do 
honour his memory, on this side idolatry as much as 
any. He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free 
nature.' ^ No more definite judgment of Shakespeare's 
individuality was recorded by a contemporary. His 
dramatic work is essentially impersonal, and fails to 

^ See A. P. Stanley's Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, i86g, 
pp. 29s seq. 

2 'Timber' in Works, 1641. Jonson seems to embody a reminiscence 
of lago's description of Othello : 

The Moor is of a free and open nature, 

That thinks men honest that but seem to be so. 

{Othello, I. iii. 405-6.) 



THE CLOSE OF LIFE 501 

betray the author's idiosyncrasies. The 'Sonnets,' 
which alone of his hterary work have been widely 
credited with self-portraiture, give a potent illusion of 
genuine introspection, but they rarely go farther in the 
way of autobiography than illustrate the poet's readiness 
to accept the conventional bonds which attached a poet 
to a great patron. His literary practices and aims were 
those of contemporary men of letters, and the difference 
in the quality of his work and theirs was due to no con- 
scious endeavour on his part to act otherwise than they, 
but to the magic and involuntary working of his genius. 
He seemed unconscious of his marvellous superiority 
to his professional comrades. The references in his 
will to his fellow-actors, and the spirit in which (as they 
announced in the First Folio) they approach the task of 
collecting his works after his death, corroborate the 
description of him as a sympathetic friend of gentle, 
unassuming mien. The later traditions brought to- 
gether by John Aubrey, the Oxford antiquary, depict 
him as 'very good company, and of a very ready and 
pleasant smooth wit,' and other early references suggest 
a genial if not a convivial, temperament, linked to a 
quiet turn for good-humored satire. But Bohemian 
ideals and modes of life had no dominant attraction for 
Shakespeare. His extant work attests the ' copious ' 
and continuous industry which was a common feature of 
the contemporary world of letters.^ With Shakespeare's 
literary power and his sociability, too, there clearly went 
the shrewd capacity of a man of business. Pope had 
just warrant for the surmise that he 

For gain not glory winged his roving flight, 
And grew immortal in his own despite. 

His Hterary attainments and successes were chiefly valued 
as serving the prosaic end of making a permanent provi- 

^ John Webster, the dramatist, wrote in the address before his While 
Divel in 161 2 of the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, 
M. Decker, and M. Heywood.' 



502 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

sion for himself and his daughters. He was frankly 
ambitious of restoring among his fellow-townsmen the 
family repute which his father's misfortunes had im- 
perilled. At Stratford in later Hfe he loyally conformed 
to the social standards which prevailed among his well- 
to-do neighbours and he was proud of the regard which 
small landowners and prosperous traders extended to 
him as to one of their own social rank. Ideals so homely 
are reckoned rare in poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter 
Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shake- 
speare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the 
sanity of their mental attitude towards life's ordinary 
incidents. 



XXI 

SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 

Of Shakespeare's three brothers, two predeceased him 
at a comparatively early age. Edmund, the youngest 
brother, 'a player,' was buried at St. Saviour's gjjake- 
Church, Southwark, 'with a forenoone knell of speare's 
the great bell,' on December 31, 1607 ; he was in ^^'^ ^^^' 
his twenty-eighth year. Richard, John Shakespeare's 
third son, died' at Stratford in February 161 2-3, aged 
39. The dramatist's next brother Gilbert would seem 
to have survived him, and he Hved according to Oldys 
to a patriarchal age ; at the poet's death he would have 
reached his fiftieth year.^ The dramatist's only sister 
Mrs. Joan Hart continued to reside with her family at 
Shakespeare's Birthplace in Henley Street until her 
death in November 1646 at the ripe age of seventy- 
seven. She was by five years her distinguished brother's 
junior, and she outHved him by more than thirty years. 
Shakespeare's widow (Anne) died at New Place on 
August 6, 1623, at the age of sixty-seven.^ She sur- 
vived her husband by some seven and a half gj^^ke- 
years. Her burial next him within the chancel speare's 
took place two days after her death. Some ^^ °^" 
Latin elegiacs — doubtless from the pen of her son-in- 

^ See pp. 460-1 supra. 

2 The name is entered in the parish register as 'Mrs. Shakespeare' 
and immediately beneath these words is the entry 'Anna uxor Richardi 
James.' The close proximity of the two entries has led to the very 
fanciful conjecture that they both describe the same person and that 
Shakespeare's widow Anne was the wife at her death of Richard James. 
'Mrs. Shakespeare' is a common form of entry in the Stratford register; 
the word ' vidua ' is often omitted from entries respecting widows. The 
terms of the epitaph on Mrs. Shakespeare's tomb refute the assumption 
that she had a second husband. 

S03 



504 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

law — were inscribed on a brass plate fastened to the 
stone above her grave.^ The verses give poignant ex- 
pression to filial grief. 

Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, long resided 
with her husband, Thomas Quiney, at The Cage, a house 
Mistress ^^ ^^^ Bridge Street corner of High Street, 
Judith which he leased of the Corporation from the 
Quiney. ^^^^ ^£ j^«g jn^friage in 1616 till 1652. There 
he carried on the trade of a vintner, and took some 
part in municipal affairs. He acted as a councillor from 
161 7, and as chamberlain in 1622-3. In the local rec- 
ords he bears the cognomen of 'gent.' He was a man 
of some education and showed an interest in French 
literature. But from 1630 onwards his affairs were 
embarrassed, and after a long struggle with poverty he 
left Stratford late in 1652 for London. His brother 
Richard, who was a flourishing grocer in Bucklersbury, 
died in 1656, and left him an annuity of 12/. Thomas 
would not seem to have long survived the welcome be- 
quest. By his wife Judith he had three sons, but all 
died in youth before he abandoned Stratford. The 
eldest, Shakespeare, was baptised at Stratford Church 
on November 23, 1616, and was buried an infant in the 
churchyard on May 8, 161 7; the second son, Richard 
(baptised on February 9, 161 7-18), died shortly after 
his twenty-first birthday, being buried on February 26, 
1638-9 ; and the third son, Thomas (baptised on January 
23, 1619-20), was just turned nineteen when he was 
buried on January 28, 1638-9. Judith outlived her 
husband, sons, and sister, dying at Stratford on Feb- 
ruary 9, 1 66 1-2, in her seventy-seventh year. Unlike 

^ The words run : 'Heere lyeth interred the bodye of Anne, wife of 
Mr. William Shakespeare, who depted. this life the 6th day of August, 
1623, being of the age of 67 yeares. 

Vbera, tu, mater, tu lac vitamq. dedisti, 

Vae mihi ; pro tanto munere saxa dabo. 
Quam mallem, amoueat lapidem bonus Angel[us] ore. 

Exeat ut Christi Corpus, imago tua. 
Sed nil vota valent ; venias cito, Christe ; resurget, 

Clausa licet tumulo, mater, et astra petet. 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 505 

other members of her family, she was not accorded 
burial in the chancel of the church. Her grave lay in 
the churchyard, and no inscription marked its site. 

The poet's elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, resided 
till her death at New Place, her father's residence, which 
she inherited under his will. Her only child Mr. John 
Elizabeth married on April 22, 1626, Thomas, ^^^^• 
eldest son and heir of Anthony Nash of Welcombe, the 
poet's well-to-do friend. Thomas, who was baptised 
at Stratford on June 20, 1593, studied law at Lincoln's 
Inn, but soon succeeded to his father's estate at Strat- 
ford and occupied himself with its management. After 
her marriage Mrs. Nash settled in a house which adjoined 
New Place and was her husband's freehold. Meanwhile 
the medical practice of her father John Hall still 
prospered and he travelled widely on professional 
errands. The Earl and Countess of Northampton, 
who hved as far off as Ludlow Castle, were among his 
patients.^ Occasionally he visited London, where he 
owned a house. But Stratford was always his home. 
In municipal affairs he played a somewhat troubled part. 
He was thrice elected a member of the town council, 
but, owing in part to his professional engagements, his 
attendance was irregular. In October 1633, a year 
after his third election, he was fined for continued ab- 
sence, and he was ultimately expelled for 'breach of 
orders, sundry other misdemeanours and for his contin- 
ual disturbances ' at the meetings. With the government 
of the church he was more closely and more peace- 
ably associated. He was successively borough church- 
warden, sidesman, and vicar's warden, and he presented a 
new hexagonal and well-carved pulpit which did duty until 
1792. Hall's closest friends were among the Puritan 

_ 1 Drayton was not his only literary patient. (See p. 466 supra) 
His case-book records a visit to Southam, some ten miles north of Strat- 
ford, where he attended Thomas 'the only son of Mr. [Francis] Holy- 
oake, who framed the Dictionary' {i.e. Dictionarie Etymologicall, 161 7, 
enlarged and revised as Dictionarium Etymologicum Latinum, 3 pts. 
4to. 1633). Francis Holyoake was rector of Southam from 1604 to 1652. 



5o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

clergy, but he reconciled his Puritan sentiment with a 
kindly regard for Roman Catholic patients. He died at 
New Place on November 25, 1635, when he was described 
in the register as 'medicus peritissimus.' He was buried 
next day in the chancel near the graves of his wife's 
parents.^ By a nuncupative will, which was dated the 
day of his death, he left his wife a house in London, and 
his only child Ehzabeth, wife of Thomas Nash, a house 
at Acton and 'my meadow.' His 'goods and money' 
were to be equally divided between wife and daughter. 
His 'study of books' was given to his soa-in-law Nash, 
'to dispose of them as you see good,' and his manuscripts 
were left to the same legatee for him to burn them or ' do 
with them what you please.' 'A study of books' im- 
plied in the terminology of the day a library of some size. 
There is no clue to the details of Hall's literary property 
apart from his case-books, with which his widow sub- 
sequently parted. Whether his 'study of books' in- 
cluded Shakespeare's library is a question which there 
is no means of answering. 

Mrs. Hall, who survived her husband some fourteen 
years, was designated in his epitaph 'fidissima conjux' 
]yjj.g and 'vitae comes.' As wife and mother her 

Susanna character was above reproach, and she renewed 
^ ■ an apparently interrupted intimacy with her 

mother's family, the Hathaways, which her daughter 
cherished until death. With two brothers, Thomas and 
William Hathaway (her first cousins), and with the 
former's young daughters, she and her daughter were 
long in close relations. Through her fourteen years' 

^ The inscription on his tombstone ran : Here lyeth ye Body of John 
Halle gent. He marr. Susanna daugh. (co-heire) of WUl. Shakespare 
gent. Hee deceased Nove. 25. A : 1635. Aged 60. 

Hallius hie situs est, medica celeberrimus arte : 

Expectans regni gaudia laeta Dei ; 
Dignus erat meritis qui Nestora vinceret annis, 

In terris omnes sed rapit aequa dies. 
Ne tumulo quid desit, adest fidissima conjux, 

Et vitae comitem nunc quoq ; mortis habet. 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 507 

widowhood, Mrs. Hall's only child, Ehzabeth, resided 
with her under her roof, and until his death her son-in- 
law, Thomas Nash, also shared her hospitality. Thomas 
Nash, indeed, took control of the household, and caused 
his mother-in-law trouble by treating her property as 
his own. On the death in 1639 of Mrs. Hall's nephew 
Richard Quiney, the last surviving child of her sister 
Judith, her son-in-law induced her to covenant with his 
wife and himself for a variation of the entail of the prop- 
erty which the poet had left Mrs. Hall. Save the 
share in the tithes, which she and Hall had sold to the 
corporation in 1625, all Shakespeare's realty remained 
in her hands intact.^ On May 27, 1639, Mrs. Hall 
signed, in a regular well-formed handwriting with her seal 
appended,^ the fresh settlement, the terms of which, while 
they acknowledged the rights of her daughter Elizabeth 
as heir general, provided that after her death in the event 
of the young woman predeceasing her husband without 
child, the poet's property should pass to the 'heires and 
assignes of the said Thomas Nash.' The poet's sister, 
Joan Hart, who was still living at Shakespeare's Birth- 
place in Henley Street, was thus, with her children, 
hypothetically disinherited. But pubhc affairs also 
helped to disturb Mrs. Hall's equanimity. The tumult 
of the Civil Wars invaded Stratford. On July 10, 
1643, Queen Henrietta Maria left Newark with an army 
of 2000 foot, 1000 horse, some 100 wagons, and a train 
of artillery. The Queen and her escort reached Strat- 
ford on the nth, and Mrs. Hall was compelled to enter- 
tain her for three days at New Place. On the 12 th of 
the month. Prince Rupert arrived with another army of 

^ While her husband lived, Mrs. Hall and he regularly paid dues or 
fines in their joint names to the manor of Rowington in respect of the 
cottage and land in Chapel Lane, which the poet bought in 1602. After 
her husband's death Mrs. Hall made the necessary payments in her 
sole name until her death. See Dr. Wallace's extracts from the manorial 
records in The Times, May 8, 1915. 

2 The seal bears her husband's arms, three talbot's heads erased, 
with Shakespeare's arms impaled. The document is exhibited in Shake- 
speare's Birthplace {Cat. 121). 



5o8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

2000 men, and next day he conducted the Queen to 
Kineton, near the site of the battle of Edgehill of the 
previous year. At Kineton the Queen met the King, 
and a day later the two made their triumphal entry 
into Oxford. Stratford soon afterwards passed into the 
control of the army of the Parliament, and Parliamen- 
tary soldiers took the place of Royalists as Mrs. Hall's 
compulsory guests. In 1644, when Parliamentary troops 
occupied the town, James Cooke, a doctor of Warwick 
who was in attendance on them, enjoyed an interesting 
interview with Mrs. Hall. A friend of Mrs. Hall's late 
John Hall's husbaud brought him to her house in order 
note-books, ^q ggg Hall's books, which Nash had inherited. 
The first volumes which Cooke examined were stated 
by Mrs. Hall to belong to her husband's library. Sub- 
sequently she produced some manuscripts, which she 
said that her husband had purchased of 'one that pro- 
fessed physic' Cooke, who knew her husband's apothe- 
cary and had thus seen his handwriting, recognised in Mrs. 
Hall's second collection memoranda in Hall's autograph. 
Mrs. Hall disputed the identification with an unex- 
plained warmth. Ultimately Cooke bought of her some 
note-books which Hall had clearly prepared for publica- 
tion. The contents were merely a selected record in 
Latin of several hundred (out of a total of some thousand) 
cases which he had attended. Cooke subsequently 
translated, edited, and issued Hall's Latin notes, with a 
preface describing his interview with Shakespeare's 
daughter.^ 

Mrs. Hall's son-in-law, Thomas Nash, died on April 4, 

^ The full title of Hall's work which Cooke edited was : ' Select Ob- 
servations on English Bodies, or Cures both Empericall and Historicall 
performed upon very eminent persons in desperate Diseases. First 
written in Latine by Mr. John Hall, physician living at Stratford-upon- 
Avon, in Warwickshire, where he was very famous, as also in the coun- 
ties adjacent, as appears by these observations drawn out of severall 
hundreds of his, as choysest ; Now put into English for common benefit 
by James Cooke Practitioner in Physick and Chirurgery : London, 
printed for John Sherley, at the Golden Pelican in Little Britain, 1657.' 
Other editions appeared in 1679 and 1683. 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 509 

1647, and was buried next Shakespeare in the chancel of 
Stratford Church on the south side of the grave xhe will of 
opposite to that on which lay the dramatist's ^^'jj^^jf^'^ 
wife. Nash's will, which was dated nearly five Thomas 
years before (August 20, 1642) and had a ^ash. 
codicil of more recent execution, involved Mrs. Hall and 
her daughter in a new perplexity. Nash, who was 
owner of the house adjoining New Place and of much 
other real estate in the town, made generous provision for 
his wife, and by the codicil he left sums of 50^. apiece to 
his mother-in-law, and to Thomas Hathaway and to 
Hathaway's daughter Ehzabeth, with 10/. to Judith 
another of Hathaway's daughters (all relatives of the 
dramatist's wife). The modest sum of forty shillings 
was evenly divided between his sister-in-law, Judith 
Quiney, and her husband Thomas Quiney 'to buy them 
rings.' But, in spite of these proofs of family affection, 
Nash at the same time was guilty of the presumption of 
disposing in his will of Mrs. Hall's real property which 
she had inherited from her father and to which he had 
no title. His only association with Mrs. Hall's heritage 
was through his wife who had a reversionary interest in it. 
With misconceived generosity he left to his first cousin, 
Edward Nash, New Place, the meadows and pastures 
which the dramatist had bought of the Combes, and the 
house in Blackfriars.^ Complicated legal formalities 
were required to defeat Nash's unwarranted claim. 
Mother and daughter resettled all their property on them- 
selves, and they made their kinsmen Thomas and Wil- 
liam Hathaway trustees of the new settlement (June 2, 
1647). Both ladies' signatures are clear and bold.^ 
Legal business consequently occupied much of the atten- 
tion of Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Nash during the last two 
years of Mrs. Hall's hfe. At length Edward Nash, 

' Thomas Nash's long will is printed in extenso in Halliwell's New 
Place, pp. 117-24, together with the consequential resettlements of his 
mother-in-lav/'s estate. 

2 The document is exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace {Cat. 122). 



5IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Thomas Nash's heir, withdrew his pretensions to the dis- 
puted estate in consideration of a right of pre-emption on 
Mrs. Nash's death. The young widow took refuge from 
her difficulties in a second marriage. On June 5, 1649, 
she became the wife of a Northamptonshire squire, John 
Bernard or Barnard, of Abington, near Northampton. 
The wedding took place at the village of Billesley, four 
miles from Stratford. 

Within a little more than a month of her marriage (on 
July II, 1649) Mrs. Bernard's mother died. Mrs. Hall's 
]y[j.g body was committed to rest near her parents. 

Hall's her husband, and her son-in-law in the chancel 

^^^ ' of Stratford Church. A rhyming stanza, 
describing her as 'witty above her sexe,' was engraved 
on her tombstone. The whole inscription ran : 

'Heere lyeth ye body of Svsanna, wife to John Hall, 
Gent, ye davghter of William Shakespeare, Gent. She 
deceased ye nth of Jvly, a.d. 1649, aged 66. 

'Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, 
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall ; 
Something- of Shakespere was in that, but this 
Wholy of Him with whom she's now in blisse. 
Then, passenger, ha'st ne're a teare, 

To weepe with her that wept with all ? 
That wept, yet set herselfe to chere 

Them up with comforts cordiall. 
Her Love shall live, her mercy spread. 
When thou hast ne're a tear to shed.' ^ 

Mrs. Hall's death left her daughter, the last surviving 
descendant of the poet, mistress of New Place, of Shake- 
speare's lands near Stratford, and of the Henley Street 
property, as well as of the dramatist's house in Black- 
friars. 

The first husband of Mrs. Hall's only child Elizabeth, 

1 One Francis Watts, of Rine Clifford, was buried beside Mrs. Hall 
in 1 69 1, and his son Richard was apparently committed to her grave in 
1707. The elegy on Mrs. Hall's tomb which is preserved by Dugdale 
was erased in 1707 in order to make way for an epitaph on Richard 
Watts. The original inscription on Mrs. Hall's grave was restored in 
1844 (see Samuel Neil's Ho7ne of Shakespeare, 1871, p. 49). 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 51 1 

Thomas Nash of Stratford, had died, as we have seen, 
childless at New Place on April 4, 1647, a^nd on ^j^^ j^^^ 
June 5, 1649, she had married, as her second descend- 
husband, a widower, John Bernard or Barnard, ^^^' 
of Abington Manor, near Northampton. Bernard or 
Barnard was of a good family, which had held Abington 
for more than two hundred years. By his first wife, 
who died in 1642, Bernard had a family of eight children, 
four sons and four daughters ; but only three daughters 
reached maturity or at any rate left issue.^ Shakespeare's 
granddaughter was forty-one years old at the time of her 
second marriage and her new husband some three years 
her senior. They had no issue. Until near the Resto- 
ration they seem to have resided at New Place. They 
then removed to Abington Manor, and Mrs. Bernard's 
personal association with Stratford came to an end. On 
November 25, 1661, Charles II created her husband a 
baronet, though it was usual locally to describe him as a 
knight. Lady Bernard died at Abington in the middle 
of February 1669-70, and was buried in a vault under 
the south aisle of the church on February 16, 1669-70. 
Her death extinguished the poet's family in the direct 
line. Sir John Bernard survived her some four years, 
dying intestate at Northampton on March 3, 1673-4, in 
the sixty-ninth year of his age. A Latin inscription on 
a stone slab in the south aisle of Abington Church still 
attests his good descent.^ 

1 These daughters were Elizabeth, wife of Henry Gilbert, of Locko, in 
Derbyshire ; Mary, wife of Thomas Higgs, of Colesbourne, Gloucester- 
shire ; and Eleanor, wife of Samuel Cotton, of Henwick, in the county of 
Bedford (Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, ii. 625). 

2 No inscription marked Lady Bernard's grave ; but the follow- 
ing words have recently been cut on the stone commemorating her 
husband: 'Also to Elizabeth, second wife of Sir John Bernard, Knight 
(Shakespeare's granddaughter and last of the direct descendants of the 
poet), who departed this Hfe on the 17th February MDCLXIX. Aged 
64 years. Mors est janua vitac' Bernard's estate was administered by 
his two married daughters, Mary Higgs and Eleanor Cotton, and his 
son-in-law Henry Gilbert (cf. Baker's Northamptonshire, vol. i. p. 10). 
The post-mortem inventory of his 'goods and chattels,' dated October 14, 
1674, is printed from the original at Somerset House in New Shak. Soc. 



512 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

By her will, dated January 1669-70, and proved in 
the following March,^ Lady Bernard gave many proofs 
Lady ^^ ^^^ affection for the kindred of both her 

Bernard's grandfather the dramatist and of his wife, her 
^' ■ maternal grandmother. She left 40I. apiece to 

Rose, Elizabeth and Susanna Hathaway, and 50/. apiece to 
Judith Hathaway and to her sister Joan, wife of Edward 
Kent. All five ladies were daughters of Thomas Hatha- 
way, of the family of the poet's wife. To Edward Kent, 
a son of Joan, 30^. was apportioned ' towards putting him 
out as an apprentice.' The two houses in Henley Street, 
one of which was her grandfather's Birthplace, the testa- 
trix bestowed on her cousin, Thomas Hart, grandson of 
the poet's sister Joan.^ Mrs. Joan Hart, Shakespeare's 
widowed sister, had lived there with her family till her 
death in 1646, and Thomas Hart, her son, had since con- 
tinued the tenancy by Lady Bernard's favour. 

By a new settlement (April 18, 1653), Lady Bernard 
had appointed Henry Smith, of Stratford, gent-., and 
The final Job Dighton, of the Middle Temple, London, 
fortunes esquire, trustees of the rest of the estate which 
speare's ' shc inherited through her mother from 
estate. 'William Shackspeare gent, my grandfather,'^ 
but Smith alone survived her, and by her will, and in 
agreement with the terms of the recent settlement, 
Lady Bernard directed him to sell New Place and her 
grandfather's land at Stratford six months after her hus- 

Trans. 1881-6, pp. 13! seq. The whole is valued at 948/. 105. 'All the 
Bookes in the studdy' are valued at 2gl. iis. 'A Rent at Stratford 
vpon Avon' is described as worth 4/., and 'old goods and Lumber at 
Stratford vpon Avon' at the same sum. Bernard's house and grounds 
at Abington were lately acquired by the Northampton Corporation and 
are now converted into a public museum and park. 

1 See Halliwell-PhUlipps's Outlines, ii. 62-3. 

^ See p. 316 supra. 

^ This deed is exhibited at Shakespeare's Birthplace, Cat. 124. Lady 
Bernard's trustee Job Dighton became in 1642 guardian of Henry Rains- 
ford of Clifford Chambers, son and heir of the second Sir Henry, and 
before 1649 he acquired all the Rainsford estate about Stratford. He 
died in 1659. {Bristol and Gloucester Archmolog. Soc. Journal, i. 889- 
90, xiv. 70 seq.) 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 513 

band's death. The first option of purchase was allowed 
Edward Nash, her first husband's cousin, and a second 
option was offered her 'loving kinsman, Edward Bagley, 
citizen of London,' whom she made her executor and re- 
siduary legatee.^ Shakespeare's house in Blackfriars was 
burnt in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the site 
now appears to have passed to Bagley. Neither he nor 
Edward Nash exercised their option in regard to Lady 
Bernard's Stratford property, and both New Place and 
the land adjoining Stratford which Shakespeare had pur- 
chased of the Combes were sold on May 18, 1675, to Sir 
Edward Walker, Garter King-of-Arms. His only child, 
Barbara, was wife of Sir John Clopton, of Clop ton House, 
near Stratford, a descendant of the first builder of New 
Place. Sir Edward sought a residence near his daughter 
and her family. He died at New Place on February 19, 
1676-7, and he left the Shakespearean house and estate 
to his eldest grandchild, Edward Clopton, who inhabited 
New Place until May 1699. In that month Edward 
Clopton surrendered the house to Sir John his father.^ 
In 1702 Sir John pulled down the original building, and 
rebuilt it on a larger scale, settling the new house on his 
second son, Hugh Clopton (b. 1672). Hugh was promi- 
nent in the affairs of the town. He became steward of 
the Court of Record in 1699 ^-nd was knighted in 1732. 
He died at New Place on December 28, 1751.^ In 1753 
Sir Hugh's son-in-law and executor, Henry Talbot, sold 
the residence and the garden to a stranger, Francis 
Gastrell, vicar of Frodsham, Cheshire, who was seeking 
a summer residence. Gastrell's occupation of New 
Place had a tragic sequel. A surly temper made him a 

^ No clue has been found to Lady Bernard's precise lineal tie either 
with her 'kinsman' Bagley, or with another of her legatees, Thomas 
Welles of Carleton, Bedfordshire, whom she describes as her 'cousin.' 

2 Edward Clopton removed next door, to Nash's house, which he 
occupied till 1705. To the garden of Nash's house he added the great 
garden of New Place. Hugh Clopton, the occupant and owner of New 
Place, did not recover possession of Shakespeare's great garden till 1728. 

' He had some literary proclivities, and published in 1705 a new edi- 
tion of Sir Edward Walker's Historical Discourses. 



514 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

difficult neighbour. He was soon involved in serious 
disputes with the town council on a question of assess- 
ment. By way of retaliation in the autumn of 1758 he 
cut down the celebrated mulberry tree, which was planted 

near the house.^ But the quarrel was not 
litiono™ abated, and in 1759 in a fresh fit of temper 
New Place, Gastrell razed New Place to the ground. After 

disposing of the materials, he 'left Stratford, 
amidst the rages and curses of the inhabitants.' ^ The 
site of New Place has thenceforth remained vacant. 

In March 1762, Gastrell, who thenceforth Hved at 
Lichfield in a house belonging to his wife, leased the 
The public dcsolatc sitc of Ncw Place with the garden to 
purchase WiUiam Huut, a resident of Stratford. The 
Place iconoclastic owner died at Lichfield in 1768, 

estate. leaving his Stratford property to his widow, 
Jane, who sold it to Hunt in 1775. The subsequent 
succession of private owners presents no points of in- 
terest. The vacant site, with the 'great garden' at- 
tached, was soon annexed to the garden of the adjoining 
(Nash's) house. In 1862 the whole of the property, 
including Nash's house and garden, was purchased by a 
public subscription, which was initiated by James Orchard 
Halliwell-Phillipps, the biographer of Shakespeare. New 
Place garden was converted into a public garden and a small 
portion of Nash's house was employed as a Museum. 

^ See p. 288 n. 2 supra. 

2 Cf. Halli well's New Place; R. B. Whaler's Stratford-on-Avon. A 
contemporary account of Gastrell's vandalism by a visitor to Stratford 
in 1760 runs thus : 'There stood here till lately the house in which Shake- 
speare lived, and a mulberry tree of his planting ; the house was large, 
strong, and handsome. As the curiosity of this house and tree brought 
much fame, and more company and profit, to the town, a certain man, 
on some disgust, has pulled the house down, so as not to leave one stone 
upon another, and cut down the tree, and pUed it as a stack of firewood, 
to the great vexation, loss and disappointment of the inhabitants ' (Letter 
from a lady to her friend in Kent in The London Magazine, July 1760). 
According to Boswell {Life of Johnson) Gastrell's wife 'participated in 
his guilt.' She was sister of Gilbert Walmisley of Lichfield, a man of 
cultivation who showed much interest in Johnson and Garrick in their 
youth, and whose memory they always revered. 



SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS 515 

In 1 89 1 the New Place estate was conveyed by Act of 
Parliament to the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trustees. 
In 191 2 the trustees renovated Nash's house, which in 
the course of two centuries of private ownership had 
undergone much structural change and disfigurement. 
Surviving features of the sixteenth century were freed of 
modern accretions and the fabric was restored in all 
essentials to its Elizabethan condition. The whole of 
Nash's house was thenceforth applied to public uses. 



XXII 

AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMORIALS 

The only extant specimens of Shakespeare's handwriting 
that are of undisputed authenticity consist of the six 
The relics autograph signatures which are reproduced in 
of Shake- this volume. To one of these signatures there 
hand-^^ are attached the words 'By me.' But no 
writing. other rcHc of Shakespeare's handwriting outside 
his signatures — no letter nor any scrap of his literary 
work — is known to be in existence. The ruin which 
has overtaken Shakespeare's writings is no peculiar 
experience. Very exiguous is the fragment of Eliza- 
bethan or Jacobean literature which survives in the 
authors' autographs. Barely forty plays, and many of 
those of post-Shakespearean date, remain accessible in 
contemporary copies ; and all but five or six of these are 
in scriveners' handwriting. Dramatic manuscripts, which 
were the property of playhouse managers, habitually suf- 
fered the fate of waste-paper.^ Non-dramatic literature 
of the time ran hardly smaller risks, and autograph relics 
of Elizabethan or Jacobean poetry and prose are little 
more abundant than those of plays. Ben Jonson is the 
only literary contemporary of Shakespeare, of whose hand- 
writing the surviving specimens exceed a few scraps. Of 
the voluminous fruits of Edmund Spenser's pen, nothing 
remains in his handwriting save one holograph business 
note, and eight autograph signatures appended to business 
documents — all of which are in the Public Record 

1 See pp. 547, 558 infra. Of the 3000 separate plays, which it is es- 
timated were produced on the stage between 1586 and 1642, scarcely 
more than one in six is even preserved in print. The residue, which 
far exceeds 2000 pieces, has practically vanished. 

S16 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 517 

Office. The MSS. of the 'Faerie Queene' and of Spen- 
ser's other poems have perished. Shakespeare's script 
enjoyed a better fate than that of Christopher Mar- 
lowe, his tutor in tragedy, of John Webster, his chief 
disciple in the tragic art, and of many another Eliza- 
bethan or Jacobean author or dramatist no scrap of whose 
writing, not even a signature, has been traced.^ 

The six extant signatures of Shakespeare all belong to 
his latest years, and no less than three of them were at- 
tached to his will, which was executed within -phesix 
a few days of his death. The earliest extant signatures, 
autograph (Willin Shak'p') is that affixed to 
his deposition in the suit brought by Stephen Bellott 
against his father-in-law, Christopher Montjoy, in the 

Court of Requests. The document, which bears the 
date May 11, 161 2, is in the Pubhc Record Office and is 
on exhibition in the museum there.^ 

1 It is curious to note that Moliere, the great French dramatist, whose 
career (1623-1673) is a little nearer to our own time than Shakespeare's, 
left behind him as scanty a store of autograph memorials. The only 
extant specimens of Moliere's handwriting (apart from mere autographs) 
consist of two brief formal receipts for sums of money paid him on ac- 
count of professional services dated respectively in 1650 and 1656. 
Both were discovered comparatively recently (in 1873 and 1885 respec- 
tively) in the departmental archives of the Herault by the archivist 
there, M. de la Pijardiere. Several detached signatures of the French 
playwright appended to legal documents are also preserved. One of 
these is exhibited in the British Museum. No scrap of Moliere's literary 
work in his own writing survives. (See H. M. TroUope's Lije of Moliere, 
1905, pp. 105-117.) 

^ See p. 277 n. supra. The signature to the deposition of May 11, 
161 2, has symbols of abbreviation in the surname, in place both of the 
middle 's' or 'es' and of the final letters 'ere' or 'eare.' It was common 
for the syllable '-per' or '-pere' to be represented in contemporary sig- 
natures by a stroke or loop about the lower stem of the *p.' Many 
surviving autographs of the surnames 'Draper,' 'Roper,' 'Cowper,' 
present the identical curtailment. 



5l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The second extant autograph is affixed to the purchase- 
deed (on parchment), dated March lo, 1612-3, of the 
house in Blackfriars, which the poet then acquired. 
Since 1841 the document has been in the Guildhall 
Library, London. 

The third extant autograph is affixed to a mortgage- 
deed (on parchment), dated March 11, 161 2-3, relating to 
the house in Blackfriars, purchased by the poet the day 
before. Since 1858 the document has been in the Brit- 
ish Museum (Egerton MS. 1787). 

The poet's will was finally executed in March 161 5-6. 
The day of the month is uncertain ; the original draft 
gave the date as January 25, but the word January was 
deleted, and the word March interlineated before the 
will was executed. Shakespeare's will is now at Somer- 
set House, London. It consists of three sheets of paper, 
at the foot of each of which Shakespeare signed his 
name ; on the last sheet the words 'By me' in the poet's 
handwriting precede the signature.^ 

Other signatures attributed to Shakespeare are either 
of questionable authenticity or demonstrable forgeries. 
Doubtful Fabrications appear on the preliminary pages 
signatures. Qf many sixteenth or early seventeenth century 
books. Almost all are the work of William Henry 
Ireland, the forger of the late eighteenth century.^ In 

1 Shakespeare's will is kept in a locked oaken box in the 'strong 
room' of the Principal Probate Registry [at Somerset House]. 'Each of 
the three sheets of which the will consists has been placed in a separate 
locked oaken frame between two sheets of glass. The paper, which 
had suffered from handling, has been mended with pelure d'oignon, or 
some such transparent material, and fixed to the glass. The work ap- 
pears to have been carried out above fifty or sixty years ago. The 
sheets do not appear to have been damaged by dampness or dust since 
they were framed and mended, though the process of mending has 
darkened the front of the sheet in places. Every care is now taken 
of the will. Visitors are only allowed to inspect it in the " strong room." 
A sloping desk has been fixed near the recess occupied by the box which 
holds the three frames, and the frames are exhibited to visitors on the 
desk. The frames are never unlocked. Permission is given to photo- 
graph the will under special precautions.' (See Royal Commission on 
Public Records, Second Report, 1914, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 137.) 

2 See p. 647 infra. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 519 

the case of only two autograph book-inscriptions has the 
genuineness been seriously defended and in neither in- 
stance is the authenticity established. The genuineness 
of the autograph signature ('W™ Sh®') in the Aldine 
edition of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' at the Bodleian Li- 
brary, Oxford, remains an open question.^ Much has 
been urged, too, in behalf of the signature in a copy of 
the 1603 edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne's 
Essays now at the British Museum. The alleged auto- 
graph, which runs 'Willm Shakspere,' is known to have 
been in the volume when it was in the possession of the 
Rev. Edward Patteson, of Smethwick, Staffordshire, 
in 1780. Sir Frederick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts, 
purchased the book for the British Museum of Patteson's 
son for 140/. in 1837. In a paper in 'Archasologia' 
(published as a pamphlet in 1838), Madden vouched for 
the authenticity, but, in spite of his authority, later 
scrutiny inclines to the theory of fabrication. 

In all the authentic signatures Shakespeare used the 
old ' English ' mode of writing, which resembles that still 
in vogue in Germany. During the seventeenth His mode 
century the old ' English ' character was finally ^^ writing, 
displaced in England by the 'Italian' character, which 
is now universal in England and in all English-speaking 
countries. In Shakespeare's day highly educated men, 
who were graduates of the Universities and had travelled 
abroad in youth, were capable of writing both the old 
' EngKsh ' and the ' ItaHan ' character with equal facility. 
As a rule they employed the ' English ' character in their 
ordinary correspondence, but signed their names in 
the 'Italian' hand. Shakespeare's exclusive use of the 
' English ' script was doubtless a result of his provincial 
education. He learnt only the 'English' character at 
school at Stratford-on-Avon, and he never troubled to 
exchange it for the more fashionable 'Italian' character 
in later Hfe. 

Men did not always spell their surnames in the same 

^ See pp. 20-1 supra. 



520 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The 
Spelling of Poct's sumame has been proved capable of 
the poet's as many as four thousand variations.^ The 
^^^^' name of the poet's father is entered sixty-six 
times in the Council books of Stratford-on-Avon, and is 
spelt in sixteen ways. There the commonest form is 
'Shaxpeare.' The poet cannot be proved to have ac- 
knowledged any finality as to the spelling of his surname. 
It is certain that he wrote it indifferently Shakspere, 
Shakespere, Shakespear or Shakspeare. In these cir- 
cumstances it is impossible to credit any one form of 
spelling with a supreme claim to correctness. 

Shakespeare's surname in his abbreviated signature 
to the deposition of 1612 (Willin Shak'p') may betrans- 
rpj^g Hterated either as 'Shak^pef' or 'Shakspere.^ 

autograph The sumame is given as ' Shakespeare ' wherever 
spe ings. -^ -g introduced into the other records of the 
litigation. The signature to the purchase-deed of March 
10, 161 2-3, should be read as 'William Shakspere.' A 
flourish above the first ' e ' is a cursive mark of abbrevi- 
ation which was well known to professional scribes, and 
did duty here for an unwritten final 'e.' The signature 
to the mortgage-deed of the following day, March 1 1 , 
1612-3, has been interpreted both as 'Shakspere' and 
'Shakapeare.' The letters following the 'pe' are again 
indicated by a cursive flourish above the 'e.' The 
flourish has also been read less satisfactorily as 'a' or 
even as a rough and ready indication that the writer was 
hindered from adding the final ' re ' by the narrowness of 
the strip of parchment to which he was seeking to restrict 
his handwriting. In the body of both deeds the form 
'Shakespeare' is everywhere adopted. 

The ink of the first signature which Shakespeare ap- 
pended to his will has now faded almost beyond recog- 
nition, but that it was 'Shakspere' may be inferred 
from the facsimile made by George Steevens in 1776. 

^ Wise, Autograph of William Shakespeare . . . together with 4000 ways 
of spelling the name, Philadelphia, 1869. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 521 

The second and third signatures to the will, which 
are easier to decipher, have been variously ^^^q_ 
read as 'Shakspere,' 'Shakspeare,' and 'Shake- graphs in 
speare ' ; but a close examination suggests that, ^ ^ ^^ • 
whatever the second signature may be, the third, which 
is preceded by the two words 'Byrne' (also in the poet's 
handwriting), is 'Shakspeare.' In the text of the instru- 
ment the name appears as 'Shackspeare.' 'Shakspe/'e' 
is the spelling of the alleged autograph in the British 
Museum copy of Florio's 'Montaigne,' which is of dis- 
putable authenticity. 

It is to be borne in mind that 'Shakespeare' was the 
form of the poet's surname that was adopted in the text 
of most of the legal documents relating to the 
poet's property, including the royal license speare' the 
granted to him in the capacity of a player in accepted 
1603. That form is to be seen in the inscrip- 
tions on the graves of his wife, of his daughter Susanna, 
and of her husband, although in the rudely cut in- 
scription on his own monument his name appears as 
'Shsks-peare.' 'Shakespeare' figures in the poet's 
printed signatures afifixed by his authority to the dedi- 
catory epistles in the original editions of his two narrative 
poems 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and 'Lucrece' (1594) ; 
it is seen on the title-pages of the Sonnets and of 
twenty-two out of twenty-four contemporary quarto 
editions of the plays,^ and it alone appears in the 
sixteen mentions of the surname in the preliminary 
pages of the First Folio of 1623. The form 'Shakespeare' 
was employed in almost all the published references to 
the dramatist in the seventeenth century. Consequently, 
of the form 'Shakespeare' it can be definitely said 
that it has the predominant sanction of legal and 
literary usage. 

Aubrey reported that Shakespeare was 'a handsome 

' The two exceptions are Love's Labour's Lost (1598), where the sur- 
name is given as 'Shakespere' and King Lear (1608, ist edition), where 
the surname appears as 'Shakspeare.' 



52 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

well-shap't man,' but no portrait exists which can be 
Shake- ^^^^ with absolute certainty to have been 
speare's exccuted during his Hfetime. Only two por- 
portraits. ^j-g^j^g ^j-q positively known to have been pro- 
duced within a short period of his death. These are the 
bust of the half-length efhgy in Stratford Church and the 
frontispiece to the folio of 1623. Each was an attempt 
at a posthumous likeness by an artist of no marked skill. 

The bust was executed the earlier of the two. It was 
carved before 1623, by Garret Johnson the younger and 
rpjjg his brother Nicholas, the tombmakers, of 

Stratford Southwark. The sculptors may have had 
monument. gQ^^g personal knowledge of the dramatist ; but 
they were mainly dependent on the suggestions of friends. 
The Stratford bust is a clumsy piece of work. The 
bald domed forehead, the broad and long face, the 
plump and rounded chin, the long upper lip, the full 
cheeks, the massed hair about the ears, combine to give 
the burly countenance a mechanical and unintellectual 
expression. 

The Warwickshire antiquary. Sir William Dugdale, 
visited Stratford on July 4, 1634, and then made the 
Dugdaie's earliest surviving sketch of the monument. 
sketch. Dugdaie's drawing figures in autograph notes 
of his antiquarian travel which are still preserved at 
Merevale. It was engraved in the 'Antiquities of War- 
wickshire' (1656), and was reproduced without alteration 
in the second edition of that great work in 1730. Owing 
to Dugdaie's unsatisfactory method of delineation both 
effigy and tomb in his sketch differ materially from their 
present aspect.^ He depended so completely on his 

1 The countenance is emaciated instead of plump, and, while the 
forehead is bald, the face is bearded with drooping moustache. The 
arms are awkwardly bent outwards at the elbows, and the hands lie 
lightly with palms downwards on a large cushion or well-stuffed sack. 
Dugdaie's presentation of the architectural features of the monument 
ajiart from the portrait-figure also varies from the existing form. In 
Dugdaie's sketch the two little nude figures sit poised on the extreme 
edge of the cornice, one at each end, instead of attaching themselves 
without any intervening space to the heraldically engraved block of 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 523 

memory that little reliance can be placed on the fidelity 
of his draughtsmanship in any part of his work. The 
drawing of the Carew monument in Stratford Church 
in his ' Antiquities of Warwickshire ' varies quite as widely 
from the existing structure as in the case of Shakespeare's 
tomb.^ The figures, especially, in all his presentations 
of sculptured monuments are sketchily vague and fanci- 
ful. Dugdale's engraving was, however, literally re- 
produced in Rowe's edition of Shakespeare, 1709, and in 
Grignion's illustration in Bell's edition of Shakespeare, 
1786. 

Later eighteenth-century engravers were more ac- 
curate dehneators, but they were not wholly proof against 
the temptation to improve on their models, vertue's 
In 1725 George Vertue, whose artistic skill was engraving, 
greater than that of preceding engravers, ^^^^' 
prepared for Pope's edition of Shakespeare a plate of the 
monument which accurately gives most of its present 
architectural features,^ but, while the posture and dress 

stone above the cornice; the figure on the right holds in its left hand 
an hourglass instead of an inverted torch, while the right hand is free. 
The contemporary replicas of the little figures on Nicholas Johnson's 
Rutland tomb at Bottesford here convict Dugdale of error beyond re- 
demption. (See p. 496 supra.) The Corinthian columns which sup- 
port the entablature are each fancifully surmounted in Dugdale's sketch 
by a leopard's face, of which the present monument shows no trace. 
(See Mrs. Stopes's The True Story of the Stratford Bust, 1904, reprinted 
with much additional information in her Shakespeare'' s Environment 
(1914), 104-123, 346-353.) Mrs. Stopes has printed many useful ex- 
tracts from the eighteenth and nineteenth century correspondence 
about the bust among the Birthplace archives, but there is very little 
force in her argument to the effect that Dugdale's sketch faithfully 
represents the original form of the monument, which was subsequently 
refashioned out of all knowledge. (See Mr. Lionel Cust and M. H. 
Spielmann in Trans. Bibliog. Soc. vol. ix. pp. 11 7-9.) 

^ The original sketch of the Carew monument does not appear in 
Dugdale's note-books at Merevale. The engraving in the Antiquities 
was doubtless drawn by another hand which was no more accurate 
than Dugdale's (see Andrew Lang, Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great 
Unknown, 1912, pp. 179 seq.). 

^ Apart from the efi&gy the variations chiefly concern the hands of the 
nude figures on the entablature. Each holds in one hand an upright 
lighted torch. The other hand rests in one case on an hourglass, and 
in the other case is free, although a skull lies near by. 



524 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of the effigy are correct, Vertue's head and face differ 
ahke from Dugdale's sketch of Shakespeare and from 
the existing statue. Vertue would seem to have irre- 
sponsibly adapted the head and face from the Chandos 
portrait. Gravelot's engraving in Hanmer's edition 1744 
follows Vertue's main design, but here again the face is 
fancifully conceived and presents features which are not 
found elsewhere. 

In 1746 Shakespeare's monument was stated for the 
first time (as far as is precisely known) to be much 
^j^g decayed. John Ward, Mrs. Siddons's grand- 

repairs father, gave in the town-hall at Stratford-on- 
° ^^4 • Avon, on September 8, 1746, a performance of 
'Othello,' the proceeds of which were handed to the 
churchwardens as a contribution to the costs of repair. 
After some delay, John Hall, a limner of Stratford, was 
commissioned, in November 1748, to 'beautify' as well 
as to 'repair' the monument. Some further change 
followed later. In 1 793 Malone persuaded James Daven- 
port, a long-lived vicar of Stratford, to have the monu- 
ment painted white, and thereby prompted the ironical 
epigram : 

Stranger, to whom this monument is she\vn, 
Invoke the poet's curse upon Malone ; 
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays, 
And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.^ 

In 1814 George Bullock, who owned a museum of curios- 
ities in London, took a full-sized cast of the effigy, and 
disposed of a few copies, two of which are now in Shake- 

^ Gent. Magazine, 1815, pt. i. p. 390. In the Stratford Church Album 
(now in the Birthplace) the painter Haydon defended Malone's treat- 
ment of the monument, but wrote with equal disparagement of his critical 
work : 

Ye who visit the shrine 
Of the poet divine 

With patient Malone don't be vext ! 
On his face he's thrown light 
By painting it white 

Which you know he ne'er did on his text ! 

July 18, 1828. R. B. H. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 525 

speare's Birthplace. Bullock coloured his cast, which was 
modelled with strict accuracy.^ Thomas Phillips, R.A., 
painted from the cast a portrait which he called 'the 
true effigies' of Shakespeare, and this was engraved by 
William Ward, A.R.A., in 1816. In 1861, Simon Collins, 
a well-known picture restorer of London, was employed 
to remove the white paint of 1793, and to restore the 
colours, of which some trace remained beneath. The 
effigy is now in the state in which it left Collins's hands. 
There is no reason to doubt that it substantially pre- 
serves its original condition.^ 

The effigy in the church is clearly the foundation of the 
Stratford portrait, which is prominently displayed in the 
Birthplace, but lacks historic or artistic value, rj,^^ 
It was the gift in 1864 to the Birthplace Trus- 'Stratford' 
tees of WilHam Oakes Hunt (b. 1794, d. 1873), ^°'^'^'^- 
town clerk of Stratford, whose family was of old standing 
in Stratford and whose father Thomas Hunt preceded 
him in the office of town clerk and died in 1827. The 
donor stated that the picture had been in the possession 
of his family since 1758. The allegation that the artist 
was John Hall, the restorer of the monument, is mere 
conjecture. 

The engraved portrait — nearly a half-length — which 
was printed on the title-page of the foHo of 1623, was by 

^ The painter Haydon, when visiting Stratford Church in July 1828, 
wrote his impressions of the monument at length in the Church Album 
which is now in the Birthplace Library. He declared the whole bust 
to be 'stamped with an air of fidelity, perfectly invaluable.' To this 
entr}' Daniel Maclise added the ironical words, dated August 1832, 
'Remarks worthy of Haydon.' Sir Francis Chantrey, near the same 
date, pronounced the 'head' to be 'as finely chiselled as a master man 
could do it; but the bust any common labourer would produce' (see 
Washington Irving's Stratford-upon-Avo?t from the Sketch Book, ed. 
Savage and Brassington, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1900, pp. 127-9). In 
1835 a Society was formed at Stratford for the 'renovation and restora- 
tion of Shakespeare's monument and bust.' But, although the church 
suffered much repair in 1839, there is no evidence that the monument 
received any attention. 

2 A chromohthograph issued by the New Shakspere Society in 1880 
is useful for purposes of study. 



526 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Martin Droeshout. On the opposite page lines by Ben 
Jonson congratulate 'the graver' on having satisfac- 
T^ torilv 'hit' the poet's face.' ^ Tonson's testi- 

Droes- J ^ •'..,. 

hout's mony does no credit to his artistic discern- 
engravmg. j^gj^|- . ^j^g exprcssion of countenance is neither 
distinctive nor Hfelike. The engraver, Martin Droes- 
hout, was, Hke Garret and Nicholas Johnson, the sculp- 
tors of the monument, of Flemish descent, belonging to 
a family of painters and engravers long settled in London, 
where he was born in 1601. He was thus fifteen years 
old at the time of Shakespeare's death in 1616, and it is 
improbable that he had any personal knowledge of the 
dramatist. The engraving was doubtless produced by 
Droeshout just before the publication of the First Folio 
in 1623, when he had completed his twenty-second year. 
It thus belongs to the outset of the engraver's profes- 
sional career, in which he never achieved extended prac- 
tice or reputation. In Droeshout's engraving the face 
is long and the forehead high; the one ear which is 
visible is shapeless ; the top of the head is bald, but the 
hair falls in abundance over the ears. There is a scanty 
moustache and a thin fringe of hair under the lower lip. 
A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals 
the neck. The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately 

^ Ben Jonson' s familiar lines run : 

This Figure, that thou here seest put. 

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 
Wherein the Graver had a strife 

With Nature, to out-do the life : 
O, could he but have drawn his wit 

As well in brass, as he hath hit 
His face, the Print would then surpass 

All that was ever writ in brass. 
But, since he cannot. Reader, look, 

Not on his Picture, but his Book. 

Ben Jonson's concluding conceit seems to be a Renaissance convention. 
The French poet Malherbe inscribed beneath Thomas de Leu's portrait 
of Montaigne in the 161 1 edition of his Essais these lines to like effect: 

Void du grand Montaigne une entiere^^Mre; 

Le peintre a peint le corps et lui son bel esprit ; 
Le premier par son art, egale la nature ;_ 

Mais I'autre la surpasse en tout ce qu'il ecrit. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 527 

bordered, especially at the shoulders. The dress in 
which there are patent defects of perspective is of a 
pattern which is common in contemporary portraits of 
the upper class. The dimensions of the head and face 
are disproportionately large as compared with those of 
the body. Yet the ordinary condition of the engraving 
does Droeshout's modest ability some unmerited in- 
justice. His work was obviously unfitted for frequent 
reproduction, and the plate was retouched for The first 
the worse more than once after it left his hands, ^"^^t^- 
Two copies of the engraving in its first state are known. 
One is in Malone's perfect copy of the First Folio which 
is now in the Bodleian Library. The other was extracted 
by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps from a First FoHo in his pos- 
session, and framed separately by him ; it now belongs 
to the American collector Mr. H. C. Folger of New York.^ 
Although the first state of the engraving offers no varia- 
tion in the general design, the tone is clearer than in the 
ordinary exemplars, and the details are better defined. 
The Kght falls more softly on the muscles of the face, 
especially about the mouth and below the eye. The 
hair is darker than the shadows on the forehead and 
flows naturally, but it throws no reflection on the collar 
as in the later impressions. As a result the wooden 
effect of the expression is qualified in the first state of 
the print. The forehead loses the unnaturally swollen 
or hydrocephalous appearance of the later states, and 
the hair ceases to resemble a raised wig. In the later 
impression all the shadows have been darkened by cross- 
hatching and cross-dotting, especially about the chin and 
the roots of the hair on the forehead, while the moustache 

1 The copy of the First Folio to which Halliwell-Phillipps's original 
impression of the engraving belonged is now in the Shakespeare Memorial 
Library at Stratford-on-Avon. For descriptions of the first state of the 
engraving see Sidney Lee's Introduction to Facsimile of the First Folio 
(Clarendon Press, 1905, p. xxii) ; The Original Bodleian Copy of the First 
Folio, 1911, pp. 9-10 and plates i. and ii. ; J. O. Halliwell's Catalogue 
oj Shakespearian Engravings and Drawings (privately printed; 1868, 
PP- 35-37)- 



528 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

has been roughly enlarged. The later reproductions in 
extant copies of the First Folio show many slight vari- 
ations among themselves, but all bear witness to the 
deterioration of the plate. The Droeshout engraving 
was copied by Wilham Marshall for a frontispiece to 
Shakespeare's 'Poems' in 1640, and William Faithorne 
made a second copy for the frontispiece of the edition of 
'The Rape of Lucrece' pubHshed in 1655. Both Mar- 
shall's and Faithorne's copies greatly reduce the dimen- 
sions of the original plate and introduce fresh and fanciful 
detail. 

Sir George Scharf was of the opinion that Droeshout 
worked from a preliminary drawing or 'limning.' But 
^j^g Mr. Lionel Cust has pointed out that Hmnings 

original or 'portraits in small' of this period were dis- 
Droes-°^ tinguished by a minuteness of workmanship 
hout's of which the engraving bears small trace. Mr. 
^°"^ ■ Cust makes it clear however that professional 

engravers were in the habit of following crude pictures in 
oils especially prepared for them by 'picture-makers,' who 
ranked in the profession far below limners or portrait- 
painters of repute. That Droeshout's engraving re- 
produces a picture of coarse calibre may be admitted ; 
but no existing picture can be positively identified with 
the one which guided Droeshout's hand. 

In 1892 Mr. Edgar Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, 
discovered in the possession of Mr. H. C. Clements, a 
rpjjg private gentleman with artistic tastes residing 

'Flower' at Pcckham Rye, a portrait alleged to represent 
portrait. Shakcspcare. It was claimed that the picture, 
which was faded and somewhat worm-eaten, dated from 
the early years of the seventeenth century. The fabric 
was a panel formed of two planks of old elm, and in the 
upper left-hand corner was the inscription ' Will™ Shake- 
speare, 1609.' The panel had previously 'served for a 
portrait of a lady in a high ruff — the Hne of which can be 
detected on either side of the head — clad in a red dress, 
the colour and glow of which can be seen under the white 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 529 

of the wired band in front.' ^ Mr. Clements purchased 
the portrait from an obscure dealer about 1840, and knew 
nothing of its history, beyond what he set down on a slip 
of paper when he acquired it. The note that he then 
wrote and pasted on the box in which he preserved the 
picture, ran as follows : ' The original portrait of Shake- 
speare, from which the now famous Droeshout engraving 
was taken and inserted in the first collected edition of 
his works, published in 1623, being seven years after his 
death. The picture was painted nine [vere seven] years 
before his death, and consequently sixteen [vere fourteen] 
years before it was pubHshed. . . . The picture was 
publicly exhibited in London seventy years ago, and 
many thousands went to see it.' These statements were 
not independently corroborated. In its comparative 
dimensions, especially in the disproportion between the 
size of the head and that of the body, this picture is 
identical with the Droeshout engraving, but the engrav- 
ing's incongruities of light and shade are absent, and the 
ear and other details of the features which are abnormal 
in the engraving are normal in the painting. Though 
stifiEiy drawn, the face is far more skilfully presented than 
in the engraving, and the expression of countenance be- 
trays some artistic sentiment which is absent from the 
print. Connoisseurs, including Sir Edward Poynter, 
Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Lionel Cust, have pronounced 
the picture to be anterior in date to the engraving, and 
they deem it probable that it was on this painting that 
Droeshout directly based his work. On the other hand, 
Mr. M. H. Spielmann, while regarding the picture as 'a 
record of high interest' and 'possibly the first of all the 
poet's painted portraits,' insists with much force that it 
is far more likely to have been painted from the Droes- 
hout engraving than to have formed the foundation of 
the print. Mr. Spielmann argues that the picture differs 
materially from the first state of the engraving, while 
it substantially corresponds with the later states. If the 

^ Spielmann, Portraits of Shakespeare, p. 14. 

2M 



530 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

engraver worked from the picture it was to be expected 
that the first state of the print would represent the pic- 
ture more closely than the later states, which embody 
very crude and mechanical renovations of the original 
plate. The discrepancies between the painting and the 
print in its various forms are no conclusive refutation of 
the early workmanship of the picture, but they greatly 
weaken its pretensions to be treated as Droeshout's 
original inspiration or to date from Shakespeare's life- 
time.^ On the death of Mr. Clements, the owner of the 
picture, in 1895, the painting was purchased by Mrs. 
Charles Flower, and was presented to the Memorial 
Picture Gallery at Stratford, where it now hangs. No 
attempt at restoration has been made. A photogravure 
forms the frontispiece to the present volume. A fine 
coloured reproduction has been lately issued by the Medici 
Society of London.^ 

Of the same type as the Droeshout engraving, although 
less closely resembling it than the picture just described, 
The 'Ely ^^ ^^^ '"^^^ House' portrait (now the property 
House' of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford). This 
portrait. picture, which was purchased in 1845, by 
Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, was acquired on his 
death on January 7, 1864, by the art-dealer Henry 
Graves, who presented it to the Birthplace on April 23, 
following. This painting has much artistic value. The 
features are far more delicately rendered than in the 

^ Influences of an early seventeenth-century Flemish school have 
been detected in the picture, but little can be made of the suggestion 
that it is from the brush of an uncle of the young engraver Martin Droes- 
hout, who bore the same name as his nephew, and was naturalised in this 
country on January 25, 1607-8, when he was described as a 'painter of 
Brabant.' 

2 Mr. Lionel Cust, formerly director of the National Portrait Gallery, 
who has supported the genuineness of the picture, gave an interesting 
account of it at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on December 12, 
1895 (cf. Society's Proceedings, second series, vol. xvi. p. 42). See also 
Illustrated Catalogue of the Pictures in the Memorial Gallery, 1896, pp. 
78-83 and Bibliog. Trans. 1908, pp. 118 seq. Mr. M. H. Spielmann 
ably disputes the authenticity in his essay on Shakespeare's Portraits 
in Stratford Town Shakespeare, 1906, vol, x. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 53 1 

'Flower' painting, or in the normal states of the Droes- 
hout engraving, but the claim of the 'Ely House' por- 
trait to workmanship of very early date is questioned 
by many experts.^ 

Early in Charles II's reign Lord Chancellor Clarendon 
added a portrait of Shakespeare to his great gallery in 
his house in St. James's. Mention is made 
of it in a letter from the diarist John Evelyn ckren- 
to his friend Samuel Pepys in 1689, but Claren- ^9^^^^^ 
don's collection was dispersed at the end of 
the seventeenth century and the picture has not been 
traced.^ 

Of the numerous extant paintings which have been 
described as portraits of Shakespeare, only the 'Droes- 
hout' portrait and the 'Ely House' portrait, Later 
both of which are at Stratford, bear any defin- portraits, 
able resemblance to the folio engraving or the bust in 
the church. In spite of their admitted imperfections, 
the engraving and the bust can alone be held indisputably 
to have been honestly intended to preserve the poet's 
features. They must be treated as the main tests of the 
genuineness of all portraits claiming authenticity on late 
and indirect evidence.^ 

^ See Harper's Magazine, May 1897, and Mr. Spielmann's careful 
account ut supra. 

2 Cf. Evelyn's Diary and Correspondence, iii. 444. 

^ Numberless portraits, some of which are familiar in engravings, 
have been falsely identified with Shakespeare, and it would be futile 
to attempt to make the record of the supposititious pictures complete. 
Upwards of sixty have been offered for sale to the National Portrait 
Gallery since its foundation in 1856, and not one of these has proved 
to possess the remotest claim to authenticity. During the past ten 
years the present writer has been requested by correspondents in various 
parts of England, America, and the colonies to consider the claims to 
authenticity of more than thirty different pictures alleged to be con- 
temporary portraits of Shakespeare. The following are some of the 
wholly unauthentic portraits that have attracted public attention : 
Three portraits assigned to Zucchero, who left England in 1580, and 
cannot have had any relations with Shakespeare — one in the Art Mu- 
seum, Boston, U.S.A. ; another, also in America, formerly the property 
at various times of Richard Cosway, R.A., of Mr. J. A. Langford of 
Birmingham, and of Augustine Daly, the American actor (engraved 
in mezzotint by H. Green) ; and a third, at one time in the possession of 



532 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Of other alleged portraits which are extant, the most 
famous and interesting is the ' Chandos ' portrait now in 
rpjjg the National Portrait Gallery. Its pedigree 

•Chandos' suggests that it was designed to represent the 
portrait. poet, but numerous and conspicuous diver- 
gences from the authenticated likenesses show that it 
was painted from fanciful descriptions of him some years 
after his death. Although the forehead is high and bald, 
as in both the monumental bust and the Droeshout en- 
graving, the face and dress are unlike those presentments. 
The features in the Chandos portrait are of Itahan rather 
than of English type. The dense mass of hair at the 
sides and back of the head falls over the collar. A thick 
fringe of beard runs from ear to ear. The left ear, which 
the posture of the head alone leaves visible, is adorned by 
a plain gold ring. Oldys reported the traditions that the 
picture was from the brush of Burbage, Shakespeare's 
fellow-actor, who enjoyed much reputation as a Hmner,^ 
and that it had belonged to Joseph Taylor, an actor con- 
temporary with Shakespeare. These traditions are not 

Mr. Archer, librarian of Bath, which was purchased in 1862 by the 
Baroness Burdett-Coutts and now belongs to Mr. Burdett-Coutts. At 
Hampton Court is a wholly unauthentic portrait of the Chandos type, 
which was at one time at Penshurst; it bears the legend '^tatis suae 
34' (cf. Law's Cat. of Hampton Court, p. 234). A portrait inscribed 
'aetatis suae 47, 161 1,' formerly belonging to the Rev. Clement Usill 
Kingston of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, now owned by Mr. R. Levine of 
Norwich, was engraved in mezzotint by G. F. Storm in 1864. (See Mr. 
Spielmann's art. in Connoisseur, April 1910.) At the end of the eigh- 
teenth century ' one Zincke, an artist of little note, but grandson of the 
celebrated enameller of that name, manufactured fictitious Shakespeares 
by the score' {Chambers's Journal, Sept. 20, 1856). One of the most 
successful of Zincke's frauds was an alleged portrait of the dramatist 
painted on a pair of bellows, which the great French actor Talma ac- 
quired. Charles Lamb visited Talma in Paris in 1822 in order to see 
the fabrication, and was completely deluded. (See Lamb's Works, ed. 
Lucas, vol. vii. pp. 573 seq., where the Talma portrait, now the property 
of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge of Glasgow, is reproduced.) Zincke had several 
successors, among whom one Edward Holder proved the most successful. 
To a very different category belong the many avowedly imaginary por- 
traits by artists of repute. Of these the most elaborately designed is 
that by Ford Madox Brown, which was painted in 1850 and was ac- 
quired by the Municipal Gallery at Manchester in 1900. 
^ See pp. 455-6 supra. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 533 

corroborated; but there is little doubt that it was at 
one time the property of Sir Willian D'Avenant, Shake- 
speare's reputed godson, and that it subsequently be- 
longed successively to the actor Betterton and to Mrs. 
Barry the actress. In 1693 Sir Godfrey Kneller made a 
fine copy as a gift for Dryden. Kneller's copy, the prop- 
erty of Earl Fitzwilliam, is an embelHshed reproduction, 
but it proves that the original painting is to-day in sub- 
stantially the same condition as in the seventeenth 
century. After Mrs. Barry's death in 1713 the Chandos 
portrait was purchased for forty guineas by Robert 
Keck, a barrister of the Inner Temple. At length it 
reached the hands of one John Nichols, whose daughter 
married James Brydges (third marquis of Carnarvon 
and) third duke of Chandos. In due time the Duke 
became the owner of the picture, and it subsequently 
passed, through Chandos's daughter, to her husband, the 
first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, whose son, the 
second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, sold it with 
the rest of his effects at Stowe in 1848, when it was pur- 
chased by the Earl of EUesmere. The latter presented 
it to the nation in March 1856. Numerous copies of the 
Chandos portrait were made in the eighteenth century ; 
one which is said to have been executed in 1760 by Sir 
Joshua Reynolds is not known to survive. In 1779 
Edward Capell presented a copy by Ranelagh Barret to 
Trinity College, Cambridge, where it remains in the 
library. A large copy in coloured crayons by Gerard 
Vandergucht belonged to Charles Jennens, of Gopsall, 
Leicestershire, and is still the property there of Earl 
Howe. In August 1783, Ozias Humphry was com- 
missioned by M alone to prepare a crayon drawing, 
which is now at Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford.^ 
The portrait was first engraved by George Vertue in 17 19 
for 'The Poetical Register' and Vertue's work reappeared 
in Pope's edition (1725). Among the later engravings, 

1 The print of the picture in Malone's Variorum edition was prepared 
from Humphry's copy; cf. ii. 511, 



534 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

those respectively by Houbraken in his 'Heads of Illus- 
trious Persons' (1747) and by Vandergucht (1750) are 
the best. A mezzotint by Samuel Cousins is dated 1849. 
A good lithograph from a tracing by Sir George Scharf 
was pubHshed by the trustees of the National Portrait 
Gallery in 1864. The late Baroness Burdett-Coutts 
purchased in 1875 a portrait of the same type as the 
Chandos picture. This painting (now the property of 
Mr. Burdett-Coutts) is doubtfully said to have belonged 
to John Lord Lumley, who died in 1609, and who formed 
a collection of portraits of the great men of his day at 
his house, Lumley Castle, Durham. Its early history is 
not authenticated, and it may well be an early copy of 
the Chandos portrait. The ' Lumley ' painting was finely 
chromolithographed in 1863 by Vincent Brooks, when 
the picture belonged to one George Rippon. 

The so-called 'Janssen' portrait was first identified 
as a painting of Shakespeare shortly before 1770, when 
The ^^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^ possession of Charles Jennens, 

'Janssen' the noted dilettante, of Gopsall, Leicestershire, 
portrait. rj.^^ legend that it formerly belonged to Prince 
Rupert lacks any firm foundation and nothing is posi- 
tively known of its history before 1770 when an admirable 
mezzotint (with some unwarranted embellishment) by 
Richard Earlom was prefixed to Jennens's edition of 
' King Lear.' The portrait is a fine work of art, and may 
well have come from the accomplished easel of the Dutch 
painter CorneHs Janssen (van Keulen) who was born at 
Amsterdam in 1590, practised his art in England for some 
thirty years before his departure in 1643, ^^^ included 
among his English sitters the youthful Milton in 1618, 
Ben Jonson and many other men of literary and poetical 
or social distinction. But the features, which have no 
sustained likeness to those in the well-authenticated pre- 
sentments of Shakespeare, fail to justify the identifica- 
tion with the dramatist.^ The picture was sold by Jen- 

^ A fair copy of the picture belonged to the Duke of Kingston early 
in the eighteenth century, and this has directly descended with a com- 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 535 

nens's heir in 1809, and early in the nineteenth century- 
was successively the property of the ninth Duke of Ham- 
ilton, of the eleventh Duke of Somerset, and of his son, the 
twelfth Duke. The twelfth Duke of Somerset left it 
to his daughter, Lady Guendolen, who married Sir John 
Wilham Ramsden, fifth baronet. Lady Guendolen died 
at her residence, Bulstrode Park, Buckinghamshire, on 
August 14, 1 9 10, and the picture remains there the 
property of her son Sir John Frecheville Ramsden. 
There is a fanciful engraving of the Jansen portrait by 
R. Dunkarton (181 1) and there are mezzotints by Charles 
Turner (1824) and by Robert Cooper (1825), as well as 
many later reproductions. ■■■ 

The 'Felton' portrait, a small head on an old panel, 
with a high and bald sugar-loaf forehead (which the 
late Baroness Burdett-Coutts acquired in 1873), -pj^^ 
was purchased by S. Felton, of Drayton, Shrop- 'Feiton' 
shire, in 1792, of J. Wilson, the owner of the p*^"^*^"^^^*^- 
Shakespeare Museum in Pall Mall; it bears a late in- 
scription, 'Gul. Shakespear 1597, R. B.' [i.e. Richard 
Burbage]. A good copy of the Felton portrait made by 
John Boaden in 1792 is in the Shakespeare Memorial 
Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. The portrait was en- 
graved by Josiah Boydell for George Steevens in 1797, 
and by James Neagle for Isaac Reed's edition in 1803. 
Fuseli declared it to be the work of a Dutch artist, but 
the painters Romney and Lawrence doubtfully regarded 
it as of English workmanship of the sixteenth century, 
Steevens held that it was the original picture whence 
both Droeshout and Marshall made their engravings, 
but there are practically no points of resemblance be- 
tween it and the prints. Mr. M. H. Spielmann sug- 
gests that the Felton portrait was based on 'a striking 
likeness of Shakespeare,' which was prefixed to Ays- 

panion picture of Ben Jonson to the Rev. Henry Buckston of Sutton 
on-the-Hill, Derbyshire. Among many later copies one belongs to the 
Duke of Anhalt at Worlitz near Dessau. 

^ See Mr. M. H. Spielmann's papers in The Connoisseur, Aug. 1909, 
Feb. and Nov. 1910, and Jan. 1912. 



536 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

cough's edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works in 1790, 
and was described as ' engrav'd by W. Sherwin from the 
original FoKo edition.' ^ 

The ' Soest ' or ' Zoust ' portrait — at one time in the 
possession of Sir John Lister-Kaye of the Grange, Wake- 
rpj^g field — was in the collection of Thomas Wright, 

'Soest' painter, of Covent Garden, in 1725, when John 
portrait. gimon cngravcd it. Gerard Soest, a humble 
rival of Sir Peter Lely, was born twenty-one years 
after Shakespeare's death, and the portrait is only on 
fanciful grounds identified with the poet. A chalk 
drawing by John Michael Wright, obviously inspired by 
the Soest portrait, was the property of Sir Arthur Hodg- 
son, of Clopton House, and is now at the Shakespeare 
Memorial Gallery, Stratford. 

Several miniatures have been identified with the dram- 
atist's features on doubtful grounds. Pope admitted 
. to his edition of Shakespeare Vertue's engraving 

■ of a beautiful miniature of Jacobean date, 
which was at the time in the collection of Edward Harley, 
afterwards second Earl of Oxford, and is now at Welbeck 
Abbey. The engraving, which was executed in 172 1, was 
unwarrantably issued as a portrait of Shakespeare; 
Oldys declared it to be a youthful presentment of King 
James I. Vertue's reproduction has been many times 
credulously copied. A second well-executed 'Shake- 
spearean' miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, successively 
the property of William Somerville the poet. Sir James 
Bland Burges, and Lord Northcote, was engraved by 
Agar for vol. ii. of the 'Variorum Shakespeare' of 182 1, 
and in Wivell's 'Inquiry,' 1827. It has little claim to 
attention as a portrait of the dramatist, although its 
artistic merit is high. A third 'Shakespearean' minia- 
ture of popular fame (called the 'Auriol' portrait, after 
a former owner, Charles Auriol) , has no better claim to 
authenticity; it formerly belonged to Mr. Lumsden 
Propert and is now in America. 

^ Spielmann, Portraits of Shakespeare, p. 27. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 537 

A bust, said to be of Shakespeare, was discovered in 
1848 bricked up in a wall in Spode and Copeland's china 
warehouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The build- ^j^^ q^^_ 
ing was, at the time of the discovery, in course rick Club 
of demoUtion by order of the College of Sur- ^^ " 
geons, who had acquired the land for the purpose of 
extending their adjacent museum. The warehouse 
stood on the site of the old Duke's Theatre, which was 
originally designed as a tennis court, and was first con- 
verted into a playhouse by Sir William D'Avenant in 
1660. The theatre was reconstructed in 1695, and re- 
built in 1 7 14. After 1756 the building was turned to 
other than theatrical uses. The Shakespearean bust 
was acquired of the College of Surgeons in 1849, by the 
surgeon WiUiam Clift, from whom it passed to CHft's 
son-in-law, Richard (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen, 
the naturalist. Owen, who strongly argued for the 
authenticity of the bust, sold it to the Duke of Devon- 
shire, who presented it in 1855 to the Garrick Club, after 
having two copies made in plaster. One of these copies 
is now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford, 
and from it an engraving has been made for reproduction 
in this volume. The bust, a dehcate piece of work, is 
modelled in red terra-cotta, which has been painted black. 
But the assumption that it originally adorned the pro- 
scenium of Sir William D'Avenant's old Duke's Theatre 
in Lincoln's Inn Fields will not bear close scrutiny. The 
design is probably a very free interpretation of the Chan- 
dos portrait, and the artistic style scarcely justifies the 
assignment of the sculpture to a date anterior to the 
eighteenth century. There is a likehhood that it is the 
work of Louis Francois Roubiliac, the French sculptor, 
who settled in London in 1730. Garrick commissioned 
Roubihac in 1758 to execute a statue of Shakespeare 
which is now in the British Museum. Affinities between 
the head in Roubiliac's statue and the Garrick Club 
bust give substance to this suggestion.^ 

^ Spielmann, Portraits of Shakespeare, p. 22. 



538 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The Kesselstadt death-mask was discovered by Dr. 
Ludwig Becker, librarian at the ducal palace at D arm- 
Alleged stadt, in a rag-shop at Mainz in 1849. The 
death- features resemble those of an alleged portrait 
™^^ ■ of Shakespeare (dated 1637) which Dr. Becker 

purchased in 1847. This picture had long been in the 
possession of the family of Count Francis von Kesselstadt 
of Mainz, who died in 1843. Dr. Becker brought the 
mask and the picture to England in 1849, ^^^ Richard 
Owen supported the theory that it was taken from 
Shakespeare's face after death and was the foundation of 
the bust in Stratford Church. There are some specious 
similarities between its features and those of the Garrick 
Club bust; but the theory which identifies the mask 
with Shakespeare acquires most of its plausibility from 
the accidental circumstance that it and the bust came 
to light, and were first submitted to Shakespearean stu- 
dents for examination, in the same year. The mask was 
for a long time in Dr. Becker's private apartments at 
the ducal palace, Darmstadt.^ The features are singu- 
larly attractive ; but there is no evidence which would 
identify them with Shakespeare.^ 

^ The mask is now the property of Frau Oberst Becker, the discoverer's 
daughter-in-law, in Heidelbergerstrasse, Darmstadt. The most recent 
and zealous endeavour to prove the authenticity of the mask was made 
in Shakespeares Totenmaske, a fully illustrated volume by Paul Wis- 
licenus (Darmstadt, 19 10). 

2 Mr. M. H. Spielmann has written on Shakespeare's portraits more 
exhaustively than any other author. His critical examination with 
photogravures of the Droeshout engraving, the Stratford bust, the 
Chandos, Ely House and Jansen portraits, and the Garrick Club bust, is 
in Stratford Town Shakespeare 1906-7, vol. x. He has summarily covered 
the whole ground in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britan- 
nica (191 1), and he has contributed to the Connoisseur (July 1908- 
March 1913) a series of twelve admirably full and detailed articles on 
alleged portraits of repute. His complete Shakespearean iconography 
is not yet published. Earlier works on Shakespeare's portraits are : 
James Boaden, Inquiry into various Pictures and Prints of Shakespeare, 
1824; Abraham Wivell, Inquiry into Shakespeare's Portraits, 1827, with 
engravings by B. and W. HoU; George Scharf, Principal Portraits of 
Shakespeare, 1864; J. Hain Friswell, Life-Portraits of Shakespeare, 1864; 
William Page, Study of Shakespeare's Portraits, 1876; Ingleby, Man 
and Book, 1877, pp. 84 seq. ; J. Parker Norris, Portraits of Shakespeare, 




WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



From a plaster-cast of the terra-cotta bust now in the possession of the Gar- 
rick Club. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 539 

A monument, the expenses of which were defrayed 
by public subscription, was set up in the Poets' Corner 
in Westminster Abbey in 1741. Pope and the ^^^^ ^^^^^ 
Earl of Burhngton were among the promoters, memorials 
The design was by WilHam Kent, and the ''IJ^^''' 
statue of Shakespeare was executed by Peter 
Scheemakers after the Chandos portrait.^ Another 
statue was executed by Roubiliac for Garrick, who be- 
queathed it to the British Museum in 1779. A third 
statue, freely adapted from the works of Scheemakers 
and Roubihac, was executed for Baron Albert Grant 
and was set up by him as a gift to the metropolis in 
Leicester Square, London, in 1879. A fourth statue (by 
Mr. J. Q. A. Ward) was placed in 1882 in the Central Park, 
New York. In 1886 a fiith statue (by Wilham Ordway 
Partridge) was placed in Lincoln Park, Chicago. A 
sixth in bronze (by M. Paul Fournier), which was erected 
in Paris in 1888 at the expense of an Enghsh resident, 
Mr. W. Knighton, stands at the point where the Avenue 
de Messine meets the Boulevard Haussmann. A seventh 
memorial in sculpture, by Lord Ronald Gower, the most 
elaborate and ambitious of all, stands in the garden of 
the Shakespeare memorial buildings at Stratford-on- 
Avon, and was unveiled in 1888 ; Shakespeare is seated 
on a high pedestal ; below, at each side of the pedestal, 
stand figures of four of Shakespeare's principal charac- 
ters : Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Prince Hal, and Sir John 
Falstaff . In the pubhc park at W^eimar an eighth statue 
(by Herr Otto Lessing) was unveiled on April 23, 1904. 
A seated statue (by the Danish sculptor Luis Hasselriis) 
has been placed in the room in the castle of Kronborg 
where, according to an untrustworthy report, Shake- 
speare and other EngHsh actors performed before the 

Philadelphia, 1885, with numerous plates. In 1885 Mr. Walter Rogers 
Furness issued, at Philadelphia, a volume of composite portraits, combin- 
ing the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford bust with the Chandos, 
Janssen, Felton, and Stratford portraits. 
^ Cf. Gentleman's Magazine, 1741, p. 105. 



540 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Danish Court. A tenth monument, consisting of a 
bust of Shakespeare on a pedestal, in which are reHefs 
representing Juliet and other of his heroines, was unveiled 
in Verona on October 30, 1910. The Verona memorial 
stands near the so-called ' tomb of JuUet ' ; a marble 
tablet was previously placed by the municipality of 
Verona on a thirteenth-century house in the Via Capello, 
which is said to have been the home of the Capulets. 
On November 4, 191 2, a memorial monument in South- 
wark Cathedral (formerly St. Saviour's Church) was 
unveiled by the present writer ; within a deeply recessed 
arch let into the wall of the south nave lies a semi-recum- 
bent figure of the poet carved in alabaster. The back- 
ground shows a view of sixteenth-century Southwark 
cut in low rehef.^ 

At Stratford, the Birthplace, acquired by the pubHc 
in 1847, is, with Anne Hathaway's cottage (which was 
The purchased by the Birthplace Trustees in 1892), 

Stratford a placc of pilgrimage for visitors from all parts 

memorials, ^j ^^^ ^^^^^^ rj.^^ 45,480 perSOUS who visitcd 

the Birthplace in 19 13 represented over seventy nation- 
alities. The site of the demolished New Place, with 
Nash's adjacent house and the gardens, is now also 
the property of the Birthplace Trustees, and is open to 
public inspection. Of a new memorial building on the 

1 The Southwark memorial, which was devised by Dr. R. W. Left- 
wich, is the work of Mr. Henry McCarthy, and the expenses were de- 
frayed by public subscription. A bust of the poet surmounts the monu- 
ment erected in 1896 to Heminges and Condell in the churchyard of St. 
Mary, Aldermanbury, where they lie buried. Numerous other statues 
or busts of the poet figure in the fag-ades of public buildings, or form 
part of comprehensive memorials not designed solely to honour the 
dramatist, e.g. the Albert Memorial, in Kensington Gardens, London. 
Shakespearean portraits of modern and more or less fanciful design 
appear in the stained glass windows of many public institutions and 
churches, e.g. Stationers' Hall, London, St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and 
Southwark Cathedral. Through the eighteenth century Shakespeare's 
head was repeatedly stamped on tradesmen's copper tokens and for 
nearly two centuries his features have formed the favourite subject of 
distinguished medaUists. Cameos and gems with intaglio portraits of 
Shakespeare have been frequently carved within the last 150 years. 



AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, MEMORIALS 54 1 

river-bank at Stratford, consisting of a theatre, picture- 
gallery, and library, which was mainly erected through 
the munificence of Mr. Charles E. Flower {d. 1892), of 
Stratford, the foundation-stone was laid on April 23, 
1877. The theatre was opened exactly two years later, 
when 'Much Ado about Nothing' was performed, with 
Helen Faucit (Lady Martin) as Beatrice and Barry 
SulHvan as Benedick. Festival performances of Shake- 
speare's plays have since been given annually during 
April and May, while an additional season during the 
month of August was inaugurated in 1910. The Strat- 
ford festival performances have since 1887 been rendered 
by Mr. F. R. Benson and his dramatic company, with 
the assistance from time to time of the leading actors 
and actresses of London. Mr. Benson has produced on 
the Stratford stage all Shakespeare's plays save two, viz. 
'Titus Andronicus' and 'All's Well.' The Ubrary and 
picture-gallery of the Shakespeare Memorial at Strat- 
ford were opened in 1881.^ A memorial Shakespeare 
Hbrary was opened at Birmingham on April 23, 1868, 
to commemorate the Shakespeare tercentenary of 1864, 
and, after destruction by fire in 1879, was restored] in 
1882 ; it now possesses nearly ten thousand volumes 
relating to Shakespeare. 

^A History of the Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, 1882; 
Illustrated Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakespeare Memorial, 1896. 



XXIII 

QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 

Only two of Shakespeare's works — his narrative poems 
' Venus and Adonis ' and ' Lucrece ' — were pubhshed 
with his sanction and co-operation. These 
issues of poems were the first specimens of his work to 
thenarra- appear in print, and they passed in his Hfetime 

tive poems. /^^ ^ ' , -^ ^ - ,. . , 

through a greater number oi editions than any 
of his plays. At his death in 1616 there had been printed 
six editions of 'Venus and Adonis' (1593 and 1594 in 
quarto, 1596, 1599, 1600, and 1602/ all in small octavo), 
and five editions of 'Lucrece' (1594 in quarto, 1598, 
1600, 1607, and 1616, in small octavo). 

Within half a century of Shakespeare's death two 
editions of 'Lucrece' were pubhshed, viz. in 1624 ('the 

sixth edition') and in 1655, when Shakespeare's 
humous work appeared with a continuation by John 
issues of Quarles, son of Francis Quarles the poet of the 

'Emblems,' entitled 'The Banishment of Tar- 
quin, or the Reward of Lust.' ^ Of 'Venus' there were 
in the seventeenth century as many as seven posthumous 
editions (in 1 61 7, 1620, 1627, two in 1630, 1636, and 1675), 
making thirteen editions in eighty- two years .^ The 

1 It has been erroneously asserted that more than one edition appeared 
in 1602, and that the three extant copies of this edition represent as 
many different impressions. The three copies are identical at all points 
save that on the title-page of the British Museum copy a comma re- 
places a colon, which figures in the other two. That alteration was 
clearly made in the standing type before all the copies were worked off. 

2 Perfect copies contain a frontispiece engraved by William Fai- 
thorne ; in the upper part is a small oval portrait of Shakespeare adapted 
from the Droeshout engraving in the First FoUo ; below are full-length 
figures of CoUatinus and Lucrece. 

^ Copies of the early editions of the narrative poems are now very 
rare. Of the first edition of Venus and Adonis the cc^y in the Malone 

542 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 543 

two narrative poems were next reprinted in 'Poems on 
Affairs of State' in 1707 and in collected editions of 
Shakespeare's 'Poems' in 1709, 1710, and 1725. Malone 
in 1790 first admitted them to a critical edition of Shake- 
speare's works ; his example has since been generally 
followed. 

Three editions were issued of the piratical 'Passion- 
ate Pilgrim,' fraudulently assigned to Shakespeare by 
the publisher William Jaggard, although it ^^^^ 
contained only a few occasional poems by the Passionate 
dramatist. The first edition appeared in 1599, '^"™' 
and the third in 161 2. No copy of the second edition 
survives.-"- 

The only Hf etime edition of the ' Sonnets ' was Thorpe's 
venture of 1609, of which twelve copies now seem known. ^ 
Thorpe's edition of the 'Sonnets' was first re- The 
printed in the second volume of Bernard Lintot's Sonnets. 
'Collections of Poems by Shakespeare' (1710) and for 
a second time in Steevens's 'Twenty of the Plays of 
Shakespeare' (1766). Malone first critically edited 
Thorpe's text in 1780 in his 'Supplement to the Edition 

collection of the Bodleian Library alone survives. Three copies of the 
second edition (1594) are known; t-wo of the third edition (1596); one 
only of the fourth edition (1599) in Mr. Christie Miller's library, Brit- 
well Court, Maidenhead; one only of the fifth edition (1600) in the 
Malone Collection of the Bodleian Library; and three of the sixth edi- 
tion (1602). Of the editions of 1617, 1620, and of the two editions of 
1630 unique copies again in each case alone survive. That of 1620 is 
in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge; the others are 
in the Bodleian Library. Two copies survive of each of the editions 
of 1627 and 1636, and of three extant copies of the edition of 1675 two 
are in America, while the third which is in the Bodleian lacks the title- 
page. Extant copies of the early editions of Lucrece are somewhat 
more numerous. Ten copies of the first edition (1594) have been traced ; 
one only of the 1598 edition (at Trinity College, Cambridge); two 
of the third edition (1600); two of the fourth edition (1607); four 
of the fifth edition (16 16); six of the sixth edition (1624); five of the 
seventh edition (1632) and some twelve of the eighth edition (1655). 

^ See p. 267 supra. 

2 See pp. 159-60 supra. Sales of the volume at auction have been rare 
of late years. The last copy to be sold belonged to Sir Henry St. John 
Mildmay, of Dogmersfield, Hants. It was in moderate condition and 
fetched 800/. at Sotheby's on April 20, 1907. 



544 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of Shakespeare's Plays, published in 1778/ vol. i. The 
'Sonnets' were first introduced into a collective edition 
of Shakespeare's works in 1790 when Malone incorporated 
them with the rest of the poems in his edition of that year. 
They reappeared in the 'Variorum' edition of 1803 and 
in all the leading editions that have appeared since.^ 

A so-called first collected edition of Shakespeare's 
'Poems' in 1640 (London, by T[homas]. Cotes for 
-Pj^g I[ohn]. Benson) consisted of the 'Sonnets/ 

'Poems' omitting eight (xviii. xix. xliii. Ivi. Ixxv. Ixxvi. 
° ^ '^°' xcvi. and cxxvi.) and adding the twenty poems 
(both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean) of 'The 
Passionate Pilgrim' and a number of miscellaneous 
non-Shakespearean pieces of varied authorship.^ A 
reduced and altered copy by William Marshall of the 
Droeshout engraving of 1623 formed the frontispiece of 
the volume of 1640. There were prefatory poems by 
Leonard Digges and John Warren, as well as an address 
'to the reader' signed ' J. B.,' the initials of the publisher. 
There Shakespeare's 'poems' were described as 'serene, 
clear, and elegantly plain ; such gentle strains as shall 
re-create and not perplex your brain. No intricate or 
cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect. Such as will raise your 
admiration to his praise.' A chief point of interest in 
the 'Poems' of 1640 is the fact that Thorpe's dedication 
to 'Mr. W. H.' is omitted, and that the 'Sonnets' were 
printed there in a different order from that which was 

^ The first editions of Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Passionate 
Pilgrim, the Sonnets, witli the play of Pericles, were reproduced in fac- 
simile by the Oxford University Press, in 1905, with introductions and 
full bibliographies by the present writer. The 1609 edition of the Sonnets 
was facsimiled for the first time in 1862. The chief original editions of 
the poems were included in the two complete series of facsimiles of 
Shakespeare's works in quarto which are noticed below, p. 550. 

2 The following entry appears in the Stationers' Company's Register 
on November 4, 1639: 'Entred [to John Benson] for his Copie vnder 
the hands of doctor Wykes and Master ffetherston warden An Addicion 
of some excellent Poems to Shakespeares Poems by other gentlemen. 
vizK His mistris drowne and her mind by Beniamin Johnson. An 
Epistle to Beniamin Johnson by Ffrancis Beaumont. His Mistris shade 
by R. Herrick, &c. . . . vj^.' (Arber, iv. 461). 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 545 

followed in the volume of 1609. Thus the poem numbered 
Ixvii. in the original edition opens the reissue, and 
what has been regarded as the crucial poem, beginning 

Two loves I have of comfort and despair, 

which was in 1609 numbered cxliv., takes the thirty- 
second place in 1640. In most cases a more or less fanci- 
ful general title is placed in Benson's edition at the head 
of each sonnet, but in a few instances a single descriptive 
heading serves for short sequences of two or three son- 
nets which are printed continuously without spacing. 
The non-Shakespearean poems drawn from 'The Pas- 
sionate Pilgrim ' include the extracts (in the third edition 
of that miscellany) from Thomas Heywood's 'General 
History of Women ' ; all are interspersed among the 
Sonnets and no hint is given that any of the volume's 
contents lack claim to Shakespeare's authorship. The 
Poems of 1640 concludes with three epitaphs on Shake- 
speare and with a short appendix entitled 'an addi- 
tion of some excellent poems to those precedent by 
other Gentlemen.' The volume is of great rarity.^ 
In 1 7 10 it was reprinted in the supplementary volume 
to Nicholas Rowe's edition of Shakespeare's Plays, and 
again in 1725 in the supplementary volume to Pope's 
edition. Other issues of Benson's volume appeared in 
1750 and 1775. An exact reprint was issued in 1885. 

Of Shakespeare's plays there were printed before 
his death in 1616 only sixteen pieces (all in quarto), 
or eighteen pieces if we include the 'Contention' (1594 
and 1600), and 'The True Tragedy' (1595 and 1600), 
the first drafts respectively of the Second and the Third 

' Perfect copies open with a set of five leaves with signatures in- 
dependent of the rest of the volume. These leaves supply the frontis- 
piece, title-page, and other preliminary matter. A second title-page 
precedes the 'poems' which fill the main part of the book. A perfect 
copy of the volume, formerly belonging to Robert Hoe of New York, 
was sold in New York on May 3, 1911, for 3200/., the highest price yet 
reached. 



546 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Parts of 'Henry VI.' These quartos, which sold at five- 
pence or sixpence apiece, were publishers' ventures, and 
Quartos of were undertaken without the cooperation of the 
the plays author. The publication of separate plays was 
poet's as we have seen,^ deemed by theatrical share- 

lifetime, holders, and even by dramatists, injurious to 
their interests. In March 1599 the theatrical manager 
PhiHp Henslowe endeavoured to induce a pubHsher who 
had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of ' Patient 
Grissell,' by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, to abandon 
the pubHcation of it by offering him a bribe of 2I. The 
pubHcation was suspended till 1603.^ In 1608 the share- 
Xhe holders of the Whitefriars theatre imposed on 

managers' disloyal actors who yielding to publishers' bribes 
to Uieir^^ causcd plays to be put into print a penalty of 
issue. ^qI 2j^^ forfeiture of their places.^ Many times 

in subsequent years the Lord Chamberlain in behalf of 
the acting companies warned the Stationers' Company 
against 'procuring publishing and printing plays' 'by 
means whereof not only they [the actors] themselves 
had much prejudice, but the books much corruption, to 
the injury and disgrace of the authors.' ^ 

But in spite of the manager's repeated protests, the 
pubHshers found ready opportunities of effecting their pur- 
pose. Occasionally a dramatist in self-defence against a 
threat of piracy sent a piece to press on his own account.^ 
But there is no evidence that Shakespeare assumed any 
personal responsibility for the printing of any of his 
dramas, or that any play in his own handwriting reached 
the press. Over the means of access to plays which 
were usually open to publishers the author exerted 

^ See p. 100 n. i supra. 

2 Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i. 119. 

* Trans. New Shaksp. Soc. (1887-92), p. 271. 

* Cf. Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 160 seq. ; Malone Soc. 
Collections, 191 1, vol. i. pp. 364 seq. 

5 In 1604 John Marston himself sent to press his play called The 
Malcontent in order to protect himself against a threatened piracy. 
He bitterly complained that 'scenes invented merely to be spoken 
should be inforcively published to be read.' 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 547 

no control. As a rule, the publisher seems to have 
bought of an actor one of the copies of the play 
which it was necessary for the manager to The source 
provide for the company. Such copies were of the ^ 
usually made from the author's autograph after '^°^^' 
the manager, who habitually abbreviated the text and 
expanded the stage directions, had completed his re- 
vision. The divergences from the author's draft varied 
with the character and length of the piece and the mood 
of the manager. The managerial pencil ordinarily left 
some severe scars. In the case of at least four of Shake- 
speare's pieces — 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Henry V,' the 
' Merry Wives ' and ' Pericles ' — the earliest printed 
version lacked even the slender authority of a theatrical 
transcript ; the printers depended on crude shorthand 
reports taken down from the Hps of the actors during 
the performances.^ A second issue of 'Romeo and 
Juliet' presented a more or less satisfactory theatrical 
copy of the tragedy, but no attempt was made in Shake- 
speare's lifetime to meet the manifold defects of the quar- 
tos of 'Henry V,' the 'Merry Wives,' or 'Pericles.' 
Thus the textual authority of the lifetime quartos is 
variable. Yet despite the lack of efficient protection 
the authentic text at times escaped material injury. 
Most of the volumes are of immense value for the Shake- 
spearean student. The theatrical conventions of the 
day not only withheld Shakespeare's autographs from 
the printing press but condemned them to early destruc- 
tion. The quartos, whatever their blemishes, present 
Shakespeare's handiwork in the earHest shape in which 
it was made accessible to readers of his own era. 

The popularity of the quarto versions which were pub- 
lished in Shakespeare's lifetime differed greatly. Thevari- 
Two of the plays, published thus, reached five t^g'^'^ 
editions before 1616, viz. 'Richard IH' (1597, editions. 
1598, 1602, 1605, 1612) and 'The First Part of Henry IV' 
(1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613). 

1 See p. 112 w. 3 supra. 



548 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Three reached four editions, viz. 'Richard II' (1597, 
1598, 1608 supplying the deposition scene for the first 
time, 1615) ; 'Hamlet' (1603 imperfect, 1604, 1605, 
161 1) ; and 'Romeo and Juliet' (1597 imperfect, 1599, 
two in 1609). 

Two reached three editions, viz. 'Titus' (1594, 1600, 
and 1611) ; and 'Pericles' (two in 1609, 1611, all im- 
perfect) . 

Two reached two editions, viz. 'Henry V (1600 and 
1602, both imperfect) ; 'Troilus and Cressida' (both in 
1609). 

Seven achieved only one edition, viz. 'Love's Labour's 
Lost' (1598); 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (1600); 
' Merchant of Venice ' (1600) ; ' The Second Part of Henry 
IV' (1600) ; 'Much Ado' (1600) ; 'Merry Wives' (1602, 
imperfect), and 'Lear' (1608). 

Three years after Shakespeare's death, in 1619, a 
somewhat substantial addition was made to these 
The four quarto editions. In that year there was issued 
unques- a sccoud edition of 'Merry Wives' (again im- 
quartosof perfect) and a fourth edition of 'Pericles,' as 
i6ig. t^qW as a reissue of the pseudo-Shakespearean 

piece 'The Yorkshire Tragedy' and a new edition of the 
two parts of 'The Whole Contention between the two 
Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke,' where the original 
drafts of the Second and Third Parts of ' Henry VI ' re- 
spectively were here brought together in a single volume 
and were described for the first time as 'written by 
William Shakespeare, Gent.' The name of Arthur 
Johnson, the original publisher of the 'Merry Wives,' 
reappeared in the imprint of the 1619 reissue. The 
title-pages of the three other volumes describe them as 
'printed for T. P.,' i.e. Thomas Pavier, a publisher 
whose principles were far more questionable than those 
of most of his fraternity. 

To the same year 1619 have also been assigned fresh 
editions of four other Shakespearean quartos and one 
other pseudo-Shakespearean quarto, all of which bear 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 549 

on their title-pages earlier dates. The volumes in ques- 
tion are 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' ('printed by 
lames Roberts, 1600'), 'Merchant of Venice' -phefive 
('printed by J. Roberts, 1600'), 'Henry V suspected 
('printed for T. P., 1608'), and 'Lear '('printed ^^^'^°'- 
for Nathaniel Butter, 1608 '), as well as the pseudo-Shake- 
spearean 'Sir John Oldcastle'^ ('printed for T. P., 
1600'). In the case of these five quartos the dates in 
the imprints are believed to be deceptive, and, save in 
the cases of 'Henry V and 'Sir John Oldcastle,' the 
publishers or printers are held to be falsely named. 

The five volumes were, it is alleged, first printed and 
pubHshed in 1619 at the press in the Barbican of Will- 
iam Jaggard, James Roberts's successor, in ^j^^ charge 
collusion with the stationer Thomas Pavier. against 
In each case Jaggard and Pavier are charged ^'^^^^' 
with antedating the publication. The five suspected 
quartos have been met bound up in a single volume of 
seventeenth-century date along with the four Shake- 
spearean or pseudo-Shakespearean quartos which were 
admittedly produced in 1619. It is suggested that 
Pavier planned in that year a first partial issue of Shake- 
speare's collective work, in which he intended to include 
all the nine quartos. But the resort to fraudulent im- 
prints in the case of five plays shews that he did not 
persist in that design.^ 

^ The suspected reprint improves on the original by newly inserting 
on the title-page the words 'written by William Shakespeare.' 

^ Very strong technical evidence has been adduced against Pavier 
from the watermarks of the paper of the nine quartos. Eight of the 
suspected quartos bear too on the title-page the same engraved device, 
a carnation, with the Welsh motto 'Heb Ddim, heb Ddieu' (Without 
God, without all). The suspected quarto of A Midsummer Night's 
Dream bears a different device, consisting of a half eagle and key, the 
arms of the city of Geneva, with the motto 'Post tenebras lux.' Both 
devices were of old standing in the trade, and the blocks seem to have 
come into the possession of the printer, William Jaggard. No intelligible 
motive has been assigned to Pavier, apart from general perversity. The 
textual superiority to its predecessor of the suspected re-issue of the 
Merchant of Venice conflicts with an accusation of wholesale piracy, 
which presumes the plagiarism of a pre-existing edition. Mr. W. W. 



550 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Only one of Shakespeare's plays which were hitherto 
unpublished appeared in quarto within a few years of 
his death. 'Othello' was first printed in 1622. 
humous ' In the same year there were issued sixth 
'OtheUo' editions of both 'Richard III' and 'The 
First Part of Henry IV, ' ^ while Shakespeare's 
name appeared for the first time on a third edition of 
the old play of ' King John ' in which he had no hand. 

The original quartos are all to be reckoned among 
bibhographical rarities. Of many of them less than a 
The scare- ^ozen survive, and of some issues only one, two, 
ityofthe or three copies. A single copy alone seems 
quartos. extant of the first ( 1 594) quarto of ' Titus Andro- 
nicus' (now in the collection of Mr. Folger, of New 
York). Two copies survive of the 1597 quarto of 
'Richard II,' of the first (1603) quarto of 'Hamlet' 
(both imperfect), of the 1604 quarto of 'i Henry IV,' 
and of the 1605 quarto of 'Hamlet.' Three copies 
alone are known of the 1598 quarto of 'The First 

Greg, in the Library for 1908, pp. 1 13-13 1, 381-409, first questioned the 
authenticity of the imprints of the nine quartos in question. His con- 
clusions are accepted by Mr. Alfred W. Pollard, in his Shakespeare's 
Folios and Quartos, 1909, pp. 81 seq. 

^ The publication of the first collected edition of Shakespeare's work 
in the First Folio of 1623 did not bring to an end the practice of pub- 
lishing separate plays in quarto; but the value and interest of such 
volumes fell quickly, in view of the higher authority which was claimed 
for the Folio text. Some of the more interesting quarto re-issues of 
post- Folio years were Richard III (1629), Pericles, Othello, and Merry 
Wives (1630), Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew (1631), 
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice (1637). Later 
in the seventeenth century publishers often reissued in quarto, from 
the text of the Third or Fourth Folios, the tragedies of Hamlet, Julius 
Ccesar and Othello. These volumes are known to bibliographers as 
'The Players' Quartos.' They include four editions of Hamlet (1676, 
1683, 169s and 1703), five editions of Julius Ccesar (the first dated 
1684 and the latest 1691) and five editions of Othello (1681, 1687, 1695, 
1701, and 1705) : see Library, April 1913, pp. 122 seq. Lithographed 
facsimiles of the quartos published before 1623, with some of the quarto 
editions of the poems (forty-eight volumes in all), were prepared by Mr. 
E. W. Ashbee, and issued to subscribers by Halliwell-Phillipps between, 
1862 and 1 87 1. A cheaper set of quarto facsimiles, undertaken by Mr. 
W. Griggs, under the supervision of Dr. F. J. Furnivall, appeared in 
forty-three volumes between 1880 and 1889. 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 551 

Part of Henry IV' and of the second (1604) quarto of 
'Hamlet.' 1 

Many large collections of original quartos were formed 
in the eighteenth century. The chief of these are now 
preserved in public libraries. To the British -phe chief 
•Museum the actor Garrick bequeathed his collections 
collection in 1779; to the library of Trinity °^^"^'"^°^- 
College, Cambridge, Edward Capell gave his Shakespeare 
library also in 1779^; and to the Bodleian Library Ed- 
mund Malone bequeathed his Shakespeare collection in 
181 2. The collections at the British Museum and the 
Bodleian acquired many supplementary quartos during 
the nineteenth century. The best collection which re- 
mains in private hands was brought together by the actor, 
John Philip Kemble, and was acquired in 182 1 by the 
Duke of Devonshire, who subsequently made impor- 
tant additions to it. This collection remained in the 
possession of the Duke's descendants till 19 14, when the 
whole was sold to the American collector, Mr. Archer 
Huntington. Another good collection of quartos was 
formed in the eighteenth century by Charles Jennens, 
the well-known virtuoso, of Gopsall House, Leicester- 
shire. Gopsall House and its contents descended to 
Earl Howe, who sold Jennens's Shakespearean collec- 
tion in December 1907.^ 

^ Much information on the relative scarcity of the quartos will be 
found in Justin Winsor's Bibliography of the Original Quartos- and Folios 
of Shakespeare with particular reference to copies in America (Boston, 

1874-5)- 

^ See p. 579 n. i infra. 

^ At the sale at Sotheby's fourteen of the Gopsall quartos were pur- 
chased privately en bloc, while the remaining fourteen were disposed 
of publicly to various bidders. Perfect copies of Shakespeare quartos 
range in price, according to their rarity, from 300L to 2,500/. In 1864, 
at" the sale of George Daniel's library, quarto copies of Love's Labour's 
Lost and of Merry Wives (first edition) each fetched 346/. 10^. On 
April 23, 1904, the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry IV fetched at Sotheby's 
1,035/., while the 1594 quarto of Titus (unique copy found at Lund, 
Sweden) was bought privately by Mr. Folger of New York in January 
1905 for 2,000/. On June i, 1907, a quarto of The First Part of the Con- 
tention (1594) — the early draft of 2 Henry VI — fetched 1,910/. at 
Sotheby's; and on July 9, 1914, a quarto, from the Huth Library, of 



552 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In 1623 the first attempt was made to give the world 
a complete edition of Shakespeare's plays. It was a 
The First Venture of an exceptional kind. Whatever 
Folio. jj-^^y i^ave been the intentions of Pavier and 

Jaggard in 16 19, there was only one previous collective 
pubHcation of a contemporary dramatist's works which 
was any way comparable with the Shakespearean proj- 
ect of 1623. In 1616 Ben Jonson, with the aid of the 
printer William Stansby, issued a folio volume entitled 
'The Workes of Beniamin Jonson,' where nine of 
Jonson's already published pieces were brought to- 
gether.^ 

Two of Shakespeare's intimate friends and fellow- 
actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, both of whom 
received small bequests under his will, were 
printers', nominally responsible for the design of 1623. 
^^f-,. , Heminges was the business manager of Shake- 

pubhshers. ° j i j i i • i 

speare s company, and had already given ample 
proof of his mercantile ability and enterprise. Condell 
was closely associated with Heminges in the organisation 
of the stage. But a small syndicate of printers and 
publishers undertook all pecuniary liability for the 
collective issue of Shakespeare's work. Chief of the 
syndicate was William Jaggard, printer since 161 1 to the 
City of London, who in 1594 began business solely as a 
bookseller in Fleet Street, east of the churchyard of St. 

The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters (1605), 
the anonymous play which suggested Shakespeare's tragedy of King 
Lear, fetched at Sotheby's the gigantic sum of 2,470^. It hardly needs 
adding that American competition is the cause of the recent inflation of 
price. 

^ This folio has a frontispiece portrait by Vaughan. Each play has 
a separate title-page. There was a re-issue of the volume in 1640. 
Three other of Jonson's plays were meanwhile reprinted in folio in 1631, 
and these were re-issued with yet another three pieces and a fragment 
of a fourth as 'The second volume' of Jonson's Workes, also in 1640. 
There was only one other collective publication within the first half 
of the seventeenth century of the works of Elizabethan or Jacobean 
dramatists, and that avowedly followed the precedent of the Shakespeare 
First Folio. Thirty-four Comedies and Tragedies by Beaumont and 
Fletcher which had not previously been printed were issued in a folio 
volume by Humphrey Moseley in 1647. See p. 558 n. 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 553 

Dunstan in the West. As the piratical publisher of 
'The Passionate Pilgrim' in 1599 he had acknowledged 
the commercial value of Shakespeare's name. In 1608 
he extended his operations by acquiring an interest in 
a printing press. He then purchased a chief share in the 
press which James Roberts worked with much success 
in the Barbican. There Roberts had printed the first 
quarto edition of the 'Merchant of Venice' in 1600 and 
the (second) quarto of 'Hamlet' in 1604. Roberts, 
moreover, enjoyed for nearly twenty-one years the right 
to print ' the players' bills ' orprogrammes. Thatprivilege 
he made over to Jaggard together with his other literary 
property in 161 5. It is to the close personal relations 
with the playhouse managers into which the acquisition 
of the right of printing 'the players' bills' brought 
Jaggard that the inception of the comprehensive scheme 
of the 'First Folio' may safely be attributed. Jaggard 
associated his son Isaac with the enterprise. They alone 
of the members of the syndicate were printers. Their 
three partners were publishers or booksellers only. Two 
of these, William Aspley and John Smethwick, had 
already speculated in plays of Shakespeare. Aspley 
had published with another in 1600 the 'Second Part of 
Henry IV' and 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and in 1609 
half of Thorpe's impression of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' 
Smethwick, whose shop was in St. Dunstan's Church- 
yard, Fleet Street, near Jaggard's first place of business, 
had purchased in 1607 Nicholas Ling's rights in 'Ham- 
let,' 'Romeo 'and Juliet' and 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 
and had published the 1609 quarto of 'Romeo and 
JuHet' and the 161 1 quarto of 'Hamlet.' Edward 
Blount, the fifth partner, was an interesting figure in 
the trade, and, unlike his companions, had a true taste 
in literature. He had been a friend and admirer of 
Christopher Marlowe, and had actively engaged in the 
posthumous publication of two of Marlowe's poems. 
He had published that curious collection of mystical 
verse entitled 'Love's Martyr,' one poem in which, 'a. 



554 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

poetical essay of the Phoenix and the Turtle,' was signed 
'William Shakespeare.' ^ 

The First Folio was printed at the press in the Barbican 
which Jaggard had acquired of R9berts. Upon Blount 
The license Probably fell the chief labour of seeing the 
Nov. 8, work through the press. It was in progress 
^^^^" throughout 1623, and had so far advanced by 

November 8, 1623, that on that day Edward Blount and 
Isaac (son of William) Jaggard obtained formal license 
from the Stationers' Company to publish sixteen of the 
twenty hitherto unprinted plays which it was intended to 
include. The pieces, whose approaching publication for 
the first time was thus announced, were of supreme 
literary interest. The titles ran: 'The Tempest,' 'The 
Two Gentlemen,' 'Measure for Measure,' 'Comedy of 
Errors,' 'As You Like It,' 'All's Well,' 'Twelfth Night,' 
'Winter's Tale,' 'The Third Part of Henry VI,' 'Henry 
VIII,' ' Coriolanus,' 'Timon,' 'Julius Cassar,' 'Macbeth,' 
'Antony and Cleopatra,' and 'Cymbeline.' Four other 
hitherto unprinted dramas for which no license was 
sought figured in the volume, viz. 'King John,' 'The 
First and Second Parts of Henry VI ' and ' The Taming 
of the Shrew ' ; but each of these plays was based by 
Shakespeare on a play of like title which had been pub- 
lished at an earlier date, and the absence of a license 
was doubtless due to some misconception on the part 
either of the Stationers' Company's officers or of the 
editors of the volume as to the true relations subsist- 
ing between the old pieces and the new. The only 
play by Shakespeare that had been previously pub- 
lished and was not included in the First Folio was 
'Pericles.' ^ 

^ See p. 270 seq. supra, and a memoir of Blount by the present writer 
in Bibliographica, p. 489 seq. 

^ The present writer described, in greater detail than had been at- 
tempted before, the general characteristics of the First Folio in his 
Introduction to the facsimile published at Oxford in 1902. Some of 
his conclusions are questioned in Mr. Alfred W. Pollard's useful Shake- 
speare Quartos and Folios, 1909, which has been already cited. 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 555 

Thirty-six pieces in all were thus brought together. 
Nine of the fourteen comedies, five of the ten histories, 
and six of the twelve tragedies were issued for the first 
time and were rescued from urgent peril of oblivion. 
Whatever be the First Folio's typographical and editorial 
imperfections, it is the fountain-head of knowledge of 
Shakespeare's complete achievement. 

The plays were arranged under three headings : 
' Comedies,' 'Histories,' and 'Tragedies.' It is clear that 
the volume was printed and made up in three xhe order 
separate sections. Each division was inde- of the 
pendently paged, and the quires on which ^^^^' 
each was printed bear independent series of signatures. 
The arrangement of the plays in each division follows no 
consistent principle. The comedy section begins with 
'The Tempest,' one of the latest of Shakespeare's com- 
positions, and ends with 'The Winter's Tale.' The 
histories more justifiably begin with ' King John ' and end 
with ' Henry VIII ' ; here historic chronology is carefully 
observed. The tragedies begin with 'Troilus and 
Cressida' and end with 'Cymbeline.' The order of the 
First Folio, despite its want of strict method, has been 
usually followed in subsequent collective editions. 

The volume consisted of nearly one thousand double- 
column pages and was sold at a pound a copy. The 
book was described on the title-page as pubHshed by 
Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, and in the colophon 
as 'printed at the charges of W. Jaggard, I'. Smithweeke, 
and W. Aspley,' as well as of Blount. On the title-page 
was engraved the Droeshout portrait, and on the fly-leaf 
facing the title are printed ten lines signed 'B. I.' [i.e. 
Ben Jonson] attesting the lifelike accuracy of the portrait. 
The prehminary pages contain a dedication in prose, an 
address 'to the great variety of readers' (also in prose), 
a hst of ' The names of the Principall Actors in all these 
Playes,' and 'A Catalogue of the seuerall Comedies 
Histories and Tragedies contained in this Volume,' 
with four sets of commendatory verses signed respectively 



556 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and 
I. M., perhaps Jasper Mayne. 

The dedication was addressed to two prominent 
courtiers, the brothers Wilham Herbert, third earl of 
The actors' Pembroke, the lord chamberlain (from 1615 
addresses, to 1626), and Philip Herbert, earl of Mont- 
gomery. Shakespeare's friends and fellow-actors John 
Heminges and Henry Condell signed the dedicatory 
epistle 'To the most noble and incomparable paire of 
brethren.' The same signatures were appended to the 
succeeding address ' to the great variety of readers.' In 
both compositions the two actors made pretension to a 
larger responsibility for the enterprise than they probably 
incurred, but their motives in solely identifying them- 
selves with the venture were beyond reproach. They 
disclaimed (they wrote) 'ambition either of selfe-profit or 
fame in undertaking the design,' being solely moved by 
anxiety to 'keepe the memory of so worthy a friend and 
fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.' 'It had bene a 
thing we confesse worthie to haue bene wished,' they 
inform the reader, ' that the author himself e had Hued to 
haue set forth and ouerseen his owne writings.' 

The two dedicatory Addresses — to the patrons and 
to the readers — which the actor-editors sign, contain 
Their phrases which crudely echo passages in the 

alleged published writings of Shakespeare's friend and 
by Ben ^^ fellow-dramatist, Ben Jonson. From such par- 
jonson. allelisms has been deduced the theory that 
Ben Jonson helped the two actors to edit the volume and 
that his pen supplied the two preliminary documents in 
prose. But the ill-rounded sentences of the actors' 
epistles lacked Jonson's facility of style. His contri- 
bution to the First FoKo may well be limited to the 
lines facing the portrait which he subscribed with his 
initials, and the poetic eulogy which he signed with his 
full name. Shakespeare's colleagues, Heminges and 
Condell, had acted in Jonson's plays, and may well 
have gathered from his writings hints for their unprac- 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 557 

tised pens. But it is more probable that they delegated 
much of their editorial duty to the pubhsher, Edward 
Blount, who was not unversed in the dedicatory art.^ 

The title-page states that all the plays were printed 
'according to the true originall copies.' The dedicators 
wrote to the same effect. 'As where (before) Editorial 
you were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and professions, 
surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the 
frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors that expos'd 
them : euen those are now offer'd to your view cur'd and 
perfect of their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their 
numbers as he conceiued them.' The writers of the 
Address further assert that ' what [Shakespeare] thought 
he vttered with that easinesse that wee haue scarce 
receiued from him a blot in his papers.' Ben Jonson 
recorded a remark made to him by ' the players' to the 
same effect." 

The precise source and value of the ' copy ' which the 
actor-editors furnished to the printers of the First Folio 
are not easily determined. The actor-editors The source 
clearly meant to suggest that they had access of the _ 
to Shakespeare's autographs undefaced by his ^°^^" 
own or any other revising pen. But such an assurance 
is in open conflict with theatrical practice and with the 
volume's contents. In the case of the twenty plays which 
had not previously been in print, recourse was alone pos- 
sible to manuscript copies. But external and internal 
evidence renders it highly improbable that Shakespeare's 
autographs were at the printer's disposal. Well-nigh 
all the plays of the First Folio bear internal marks of 
transcription and revision by the theatrical manager. 

^ George Steevens claimed the Address 'To the Great Variety of 
Readers' for Ben Jonson, and cited in support of his contention many 
parallel passages from Jonson's works. (See Malone's Variorum Shake- 
speare, vol. ii. pp. 663-675.) Prof. W. Dinsmore Briggs has on like 
doubtful grounds extended Jonson's claim to the dedication (cf. The 
Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 12, 1914, and April 22, 1915), but Mr. 
Percy Simpson has questioned Prof. Briggs's conclusions on grounds 
that deserve acceptance (cf. ibid. Nov. 19, 1914, and May 20, 1915). 

^ See p. 97 supra. 



5S8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In spite of their heated disclaimer, the editors sought 
help too from the published Quartos. But most of the 
pieces were printed from hitherto unprinted copies which 
had been made for theatrical uses. Owing to the sudden 
destruction by fire of the Globe theatre in 1613 there 
were special difficulties in bringing material for the 
volume together. When the like disaster befel the For- 
tune theatre in 162 1, we learn specifically that none of 
the theatrical manuscripts or prompt books escaped. 
Heminges, who was 'book-keeper' as well as general 
manager of the Globe, could only have replenished his 
theatrical library with copies of plays which were not 
at the date of the fire in his custody at the theatre. 
Two sources were happily available. Many transcripts 
were in the private possession of actors, and there were 
extant several ' fair copies ' which the author or actor had 
according to custom procured for presentation to friends 
and patrons.^ 

^ Copies of plays were at times also preserved by the licenser of plays, 
who was in the habit of directing the 'book-keeper' of the theatre to 
supply him with 'a fair copy' of a play after he had examined and cor- 
rected the author's manuscript. *A fair copy' of Beaumont and 
Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune (played in 161 3) which was made for 
the licenser Sir Henry Herbert is in the Dyce Library at South Kensing- 
ton ; a note in the licenser's autograph states that the original manuscript 
was lost. Apart from pieces written by students for the Universities, 
all save some half-a-dozen autographs of Elizabethan and Jacobean 
plays seem to have disappeared, and the contemporary scrivener's 
transcripts which survive are few. A good example of a private trans- 
script made for a patron by a professional scribe is a draft of Beaumont 
and Fletcher's Humorous Lieutenant dated in 1625, which is preserved 
among the Wynn MSS. at Peniarth. Fair copies of like calibre of six 
plays of William Percy, a minor dramatist, were until lately in the Duke 
of Devonshire's collection, and nine plays avowedly prepared for a 
patron by their author Cosmo Manuche belonged in the eighteenth 
century to the Marquis of Northampton. Of private transcripts which 
were acquired and preserved by contemporary actors, two good speci- 
mens are a copy of The Telltale, an anonymous comedy in five acts, among 
the Dulwich College manuscripts, No. xx, and a copy of Middleton's 
Witch among Malone's MSS. at the Bodleian. The actor Alleyn's 
manuscript copy of portions of Greene's play of Orlando Furioso also 
at Dulwich (I. No. 138) presents many points of interest. The Egerton 
MS. 1994 contains as many as fifteen transcripts of plays, nearly all of 
which seem to answer the description of private transcripts made either 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 559 

There are marked inequalities in the textual value of 
the thirty-six plays of the First Folio. The twenty 
newly published pieces vary greatly in authen- rj.^^^^^, 
ticity. 'The Tempest,' 'The Two Gentlemen value 
of Verona,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'A Winter's Tale,' ^[^^^ 
'Julius Caesar,' and 'Antony and Cleopatra' printed 
adhere, it would seem, very closely to the ^^^^' 
form in which they came from the author's pen. 'The 
Taming of the Shrew,' 'The Comedy of Errors,' 'As You 
Like It,' the three parts of 'Henry VI,' 'King John,' and 
'Henry VIII' follow fairly accurate transcripts. But 
the remaining six pieces, 'All's Well that Ends Well,' 
'Measure for Measure,' 'Macbeth,' 'Coriolanus,' 'Cym- 
beline,' and 'Timon of Athens,' are very corrupt versions 
and abound in copyists' incoherences. 

With regard to the sixteen plays of which printed 
Quartos were available, the editors of the First Folio 
ignored eight of the preceding editions. Of The eight] 
'Richard III,' 'Merry Wives,' 'Henry V,' neglected 
'Othello,' 'Lear,' '2 Henry IV,' 'Hamlet,' and ^^^'*°'- 
'Troilus and Cressida,' all of which were in print, manu- 
script versions were alone laid under contribution by 
the FoHo. The Quartos of 'Richard III,' 'Merry 
Wives,' and 'Henry V lacked authentic value, and the 
Foho editors did good service in superseding them. 
Elsewhere their neglect of the Quartos reflects on their 
critical acumen. In the case of 'Lear' and 'Troilus 
and Cressida,' several passages of value which figure in 

for actors or for their friends or patrons. The publisher, Humphrey 
Moseley, when he collected in a folio volume the unprinted plays of 
Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, informed his readers that he 'had the 
originalls from such as received them from the Authors themselves,' 
that 'when private friends desir'd a copy, they [i.e. the Actors] then 
(and justly too) transcribed what they Acted,' and that "twere vain 
to mention the chargeableness of this work [i.e. the cost of gathering 
the scattered plays for collective publication], for those who own'd the 
Manuscripts too well knew their value to make a cheap estimate of any 
of these Pieces.' Moseley brought the 'copy' together after the theatres 
were closed and their libraries dispersed, but his references to the dis- 
tribution of dramatic manuscripts and the manner of collecting them 
presume practices of old standing. See p. 552 n. 



560 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the Quartos are omitted by the Folio, and the Folio 
additions need supplementing before the texts can be 
reckoned complete. Similar relations subsist between 
the text of the Second Quarto of ' Hamlet ' and the inde- 
pendent Folio version of the play. On the other hand, the 
new Folio text of ' Othello ' improves on the Quarto text. 
The Folio text of ' The Second Part of Henry IV ' supplies 
important passages absent from the Quarto ; yet it is 
inferior to its predecessor in general accuracy. 

Of the remaining eight Quartos substantial use was 
made by the Folio editors, in spite of the comprehensive 
The eight ^^^^ which they cast on all pre-existing editions, 
reprinted At times the editors made additions chiefly 
Quartos. -^ ^j^g ^^y ^£ stage directions to such Quarto 
texts as they employed. If the Quarto existed in more 
than one edition, the Folio editors usually accepted the 
guidance of a late issue, however its textual value com- 
pared with its predecessor. The only Quarto of 'Love's 
Labour's Lost' — that of 1598 — was reproduced lit- 
erally, but without scrupulous care. 'A Midsummer 
Night's Dream' followed rather more carefully the 
text of Pavier's (second) Quarto, v/hich is said to have 
been falsely dated 1600. The Folio version of 'Richard 
II' follows the late (fourth) Quarto of 161 5, which is for 
the most part less trustworthy than the first Quarto of 
1597 — in spite of the temporary suppression there of 
great part of the deposition scene first supplied in the 
third Quarto of 1608. 'Romeo and Juliet' is taken 
from the third Quarto of 1609, and though the punctu- 
ation is improved and the stage directions are expanded, 
the Folio text shows some typographical degeneracy. 
The First Folio prints the 161 1 (the third) Quarto of 
'Titus Andronicus' with new stage directions, some 
textual alterations and some additions including one 
necessary scene (Act III. Sc. 2). 'The First Part of 
Henry IV' is printed from the fifth Quarto of 1613 with 
a good many corrections. 'The Merchant of Venice' 
is faithful to the 1600 or the earlier of two Quarto issues, 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 56 1 

and 'Much Ado' is loyal to the only Quarto of 1600 ; in 
both cases new stage directions are added. 

As a specimen of typography the First Folio is not to 
be commended. There are a great many contemporary 
fohos of larger bulk far more neatly and cor- The typog- 
rectly printed. It looks as though Jaggard's raphy. 
printing office were undermanned. Proofs that the 
book was printed off without adequate supervision could 
be multiplied almost indefinitely. Passages in foreign 
languages are rarely intelKgible, and testify with singular 
completeness to the proofreader's inefficiency. Apart 
from misprints in the text, errors in pagination and in 
the signatures recur with embarrassing frequency. 
Many headlines are irregular. Capital letters irrespon- 
sibly distinguish words within the sentence, and although 
itaKc type is more methodically employed, the implicit 
rules are often disobeyed. The system of punctuation 
which was adopted by Jacobean printers of plays differed 
from our own ; it would seem to have followed rhythmi- 
cal rather than logical principles ; commas, semicolons, 
colons, brackets and h3^hens indicated the pauses which 
the rhythm required. But the punctuation of the First 
Folio often ignored all just methods.^ The sheets seem 
to have been worked off very slowly, and corrections, as 
was common, were made while the press was working, 
so that the copies struck off later differ occasionally from 
the earher copies. 

An irregularity which is common to all copies is that 
'Troilus and Cressida,' though in the body of the book 
it opens the section of tragedies, is not men- irregular 
tioned at all in the table of contents, and the copies. 
play is unpaged except on its second and third pages, 
which bear the numbers 79 and 80.^ Several copies are 

^ To Mr. Percy Simpson is due the credit of determining in his Shake- 
spearian Punctuation (191 1) the true principles of Elizabethan and 
Jacobean punctuation. 

^ Cf. p. 368 supra. Full descriptions of this and other irregularities 
of the First Folio are given in the present author's Introduction to the 
Oxford facsimile of the First Folio, 1902, 

20 



562 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

distinguished by more interesting irregularities, in some 
cases unique. Copies in the PubHc Library in New York 
and the Barton collection in the Boston Public Library, 
like the copy sold in 1897 to an American collector by 
Bishop John Vertue, include a cancel duplicate of a leaf 
of 'As You Like It' (sheet R of the Comedies).^ In 
Bishop Samuel Butler's copy, now in the National 
Library at Paris, a proof leaf of ' Hamlet ' was bound up 
with the corrected leaf.^ 

The most interesting irregularity yet noticed appears 
in one of the two copies of the book which belonged to 
rpj^g the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and is now 

Sheldon the property of Mr. Burdett-Coutts. This copy, 
^°^^' which is known as the Sheldon Folio, formed 

in the seventeenth century part of the library of the 
Sheldon family of Weston Manor in the parish of Long 
Compton, Warwickshire, not very far from Stratford- 
on-Avon.^ A subsequent owner was John Home Tooke, 
the radical politician and philologist, who scattered 
about the margins of the volume many manuscript notes 
attesting an unqualified faith in the authenticity of the 
First Folio text.'^ In the Sheldon Folio the opening page 

^ The copy in the New York Public Library was bought by Lenox 
the American collector at Sotheby's in 1855 for 163^. 16^. He inserted 
a title-page (inlaid and bearing the wilfully mutilated date 1622) from 
another copy, which had been described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 
182 1 (xxi. 449) as then in the possession of Messrs. J. and A. Arch, book- 
sellers, of Cornhill. 

^ This is described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821, xxi. 449-50. 

^ The book would seem to have been acquired in 1628 by William 
Sheldon of Weston (who was born there March 9, 1588-9, and died 
on April 9, 1659). Its next owner was apparently William Sheldon's 
son, Ralph Sheldon) who was born on Aug. 4, 1623, and died without 
issue on June 24, 1684), and from him the book passed to his cousin and 
heir, also Ralph Sheldon, who died on Dec. 20, 1720. A note in a con- 
temporary hand records that the copy was bought in 1628 for 3/. 15^., a 
somewhat extravagant price. A further entry says that it cost three 
score pounds of silver, i.e. pounds Scot (=60 shillings). The Sheldon 
family arms are on the sides of the volume. 

* Home Tooke, whose marginal notes interpret difficult words, cor- 
rect misprints, or suggest new readings, presented the volume in 1810 
to his friend Sir Francis Burdett. On Sir Francis's death in 1844 it 
passed to his only son. Sir Robert Burdett, whose sister, the late Baroness 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 563 

of 'Troilus and Cressida,' of which the recto or front is 
occupied by the prologue and the verso or back by the 
opening lines of the text of the play, is followed by a 
superfluous leaf. On the recto or front of the unnecessary 
leaf ^ are printed the concluding lines of ' Romeo and 
Juliet' in place of the prologue to 'Troilus and Cressida.' 
At the back or verso are the opening lines of 'Troilus 
and Cressida' repeated from the preceding page. The 
presence of a different ornamental headpiece on each page 
proves that the two are taken from different settings of 
the type. At a later page in the Sheldon copy the con- 
cluding Hues of ' Romeo and Juliet ' are duly reprinted at 
the close of the play, and on the verso or back of the leaf, 
which supplies them in their right place, is the opening 
passage, as in other copies, of ' Timon of Athens.' These 
curious confusions attest that while the work was in 
course of composition the printers or editors of the volume 
at one time intended to place 'Troilus and Cressida,' 
with the prologue omitted, after 'Romeo and Juliet.' 
The last page of ' Romeo and Juliet ' is in all copies num- 
bered 79, an obvious misprint for 77 ; the first leaf of 
' Troilus ' is unpaged ; but the second and third pages of 
'Troilus' are numbered 79 and 80. It was doubtless 
determined suddenly while the volume was in the press 
to transfer 'Troilus and Cressida' to the head of the 
tragedies from a place near the end, but the numbers on 
the opening pages which indicated its first position were 
clumsily retained, and to avoid the further extensive 

Burdett-Coutts, inherited it on Sir Robert's death in 1880. In his 'Di- 
versions of Purley' (ed. 1840, p. 338) Home Tooke wrote thus of the First 
Folio which he studied in this copy : 'The First Folio, in my opinion, is 
the only edition worth regarding. And it is much to be wished, that an 
edition of Shakespeare were given literatim according to the first Folio ; 
which is now become so scarce and dear, that few persons can obtain it. 
For, by the presumptuous licence of the dwarfish commentators, who 
are for ever cutting him down to their own size, we risque the loss of 
Shakespeare's genuine text ; which that Folio assuredly contains ; not- 
withstanding some few slight errors of the press, which might be noted, 
without altering.' 

1 It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the 
leaf is missing, but it was presumably G G 3. 



564 W2XLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

correction of the pagination that was required by the 
play's change of position, its remaining pages were 
allowed to go forth unnumbered.^ 

Yet another copy of the First Folio presents unique 
features of a different kind of interest. Mr. Coningsby 
-. ,, Sibthorp of Sudbrooke Holme, Lincoln, pos- 
presenta- scsses a copy which has been in the hbrary of his 
ofThe°^^ family for more than a century, and is beyond 
First doubt one of the very earliest that came from 

° "■ the press of the printer William Jaggard. The 

title-page, which bears Shakespeare's portrait, shows the 
plate in an early state, and the engraving is printed with 
unusual firmness and clearness. Although the copy is 
not at all points perfect and several leaves have been 
supplied in facsimile, it is a taller copy than any other, 
being thirteen and a half inches high, and thus nearly 
half an inch superior in stature to that of any other 
known copy. The binding, rough calf, is partly original ; 
and on the title-page is a manuscript inscription, in 
contemporary handwriting of indisputable authenticity, 
attesting that the copy was a gift to an intimate friend 
by the printer Jaggard. The inscription reads thus : 

The fragment of the original binding is stamped with an 
heraldic device, in which a muzzled bear holds a banner in 
its left paw and in its right a squire's helmet. There is a 
crest of a bear's head above, and beneath is a scroll with 
the motto 'Augusta Vincenti' {i.e. 'proud things to the 
conqueror ') . This motto proves to be a pun on the name 
of the owner of the heraldic badge — Augustine Vincent, 
a highly respected official of the College of Arms, who is 

^ The copy of the First Folio, which belonged to Mr. J. Pierpont 
Morgan, of New York, contains a like irregularity. See the present 
writer's Census of Extant Copies of the First Folio, a supplement to the 
Facsimile Reproduction (Oxford, 1902). 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 565 

known from independent sources to have been, at the date 
of the pubHcation, in intimate relations with the printer 
of the First FoKo.^ It is therefore clear that it was to 
Augustine Vincent that Jaggard presented as a free gift 
one of the first copies of this great volume which came 
from his press. The inscription on the title-page is in 
Vincent's handwriting. 

A copy of the Folio delivered in sheets by the Sta- 
tioners' Company late in 1623 to the librarian of the 
Bodleian, Oxford, was sent for binding to an -pj^^ 
Oxford binder on February 17, 1623-4, and, Turbutt 
being duly returned to the library, was chained ^'^'^^' 
to the shelves. The volume was sold by the curators of 

' Shortly before this great Shakespearean enterprise was undertaken, 
Vincent the Herald and Jaggard the printer had been jointly the object 
of a violent and slanderous attack by a perverse-tempered personage 
named Ralph Brooke. This Brooke was one of Vincent's colleagues at 
the College of Arms. He could never forgive the bestowal, some years 
earlier, of an ofi&ce superior to his own on an outsider, a stranger to the 
College, William Camden, the distinguished writer on history and 
archaeology. From that time forth he made it the business of his life 
to attack in print Camden and his friends, of whom Vincent was one. 
He raised objection to the grant of arms to Shakespeare, for which Cam- 
den would seem to have been mainly responsible (see pp. 281 seq. supra). 
His next step was to compile and publish a Catalogue of the Nobility, 
a sort of controversial Peerage, in which he claimed, with abusive vigour, 
to expose Camden and his friends' ignorance of the genealogies of the 
great families of England. Brooke's book was printed in 1619 by Jag- 
gard. The Camden faction discovered in it abundance of discreditable 
errors. The errors were due, Brooke replied, in a corrected edition of 
1622, to the incompetence of his printer Jaggard. Then Augustine 
Vincent, Camden's friend, the first owner of the Sibthorp copy of the 
First Folio, set himself to prove Brooke's pretentious incompetence 
and malignity. Jaggard, who resented Brooke's aspersions on his pro- 
fessional skill in typography, not only printed and published Vincent's 
Discovery of Brooke's Errors, as Vincent entitled his reply, but inserted 
in Vincent's volume a personal vindication of his printing-ofhce from 
Brooke's strictures. Vincent's denunciation of Brooke, to which Jag- 
gard contributed his caustic preface, was published in 1622, and gave 
Brooke his quietus. Incidentally, Jaggard and his ally Vincent avenged 
Brooke's criticism of the great dramatist's right to the arms that the 
Heralds' College, at the instance of Vincent's friend Camden, had granted 
him long before. It was appropriate that Jaggard when he next year 
engaged in the great enterprise of the Shakespeare First Folio should 
present his friend and fellow-victor in the recent strife with an early 
copy of the volume. (See art. by present writer in Cornhill Magazine, 
April 1899.) 



566 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

the Bodleian as a duplicate on purchasing a copy of the 
Third Folio in 1664 ; but it was in 1906 re-purchased for 
the Bodleian from Mr. W. G. Turbutt of Ogsdon Hall, 
Derbyshire, an ancestor of whom seems to have acquired 
it soon after it left the Bodleian Library. The portrait 
is from the plate in its second state.^ 

The First Folio is intrinsically the most valuable vol- 
ume in the whole range of English hterature, and extrin- 

, sically is only exceeded in value by some half- 
Estimated , "^ 1 ^j- ,. 1, ir 

number of dozen volumes of far earlier date and of ex- 
extant ceptional typographical interest. The original 
edition probably numbered 500 copies. Of 
these more than one hundred and eighty -are now trace- 
able, one-third of them being in America.^ Several of 
the extant copies are very defective, and most have 
undergone extensive reparation. Only fourteen are in 
a quite perfect state, that is, with the portrait printed 
{not inlaid) on the title-page, and the flyleaf facing it, 
with all the pages succeeding it, intact and uninjured. 
(The flyleaf contains Ben Jonson's verses attesting the 
truthfulness of the portrait.) Excellent copies which 
remain in Great Britain in this enviable state are in the 
Grenville Library at the British Museum, and in the 
libraries of the Earl of Crawford and Mr. W. A. Burdett- 
Coutts. Two other copies of equal merit, which were 
formerly the property of A. H. Huth and the Duke of 
Devonshire respectively, have recently passed to America. 
The Huth copy was presented to Yale University by Mr. 
A. W. Cochran in 191 1. The Duke's famous copy be- 
came the property of Mr. Archer Huntington of New 

^ The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare, by F, 
Madan, G. R. M. Turbutt, and S. Gibson, Oxford, 1905, fol. A second 
copy of the First Folio in the Bodleian is in the Malone collection and 
has been in the library since 1821. 

^ One hundred and sixty copies in various conditions were described 
by me in the Census of Extant Copies appended to the Oxford Facsimile 
of the First Folio (1902), and fourteen additional copies in Notes and 
Additions to the Census, 1906. Six further copies have since come under 
my notice. Of fourteen first-rate copies which were in England in 1902, 
five have since been sold to American collectors. 



QUARTOS AND FOLlOS 567 

York in 1914. A good but somewhat inferior copy, 
formerly the property of Frederick Locker-Lampson of 
Rowfant, was bequeathed in 19 13 to Harvard University 
by Harry Elkins Widener of Philadelphia. Several good 
copies of the volume have lately been acquired by Mr. 
H. C. Folger of New York. 

On the continent of Europe three copies of the First 
Folio are known. One is in the Royal Library at Berlin, 
and another in the Library of Padua University, Continen- 
but both of these are imperfect ; the third copy, *^^ copies, 
which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, is perfect 
save that the preliminary verses and title-page are 
mounted.^ 

The 'Daniel' copy which belonged to the late Baroness 
Burdett-Coutts, and is on the whole the finest and cleanest 
extant, measures 13I inches by 8j, and was 
purchased by the Baroness for 716/. 2s. at value of 
the sale of George Daniel's library in 1864. ^q^q^"^^*^ 
This comparatively small sum was long the 
highest price paid for the book. A perfect copy, meas- 
uring 12^% inches by 7^1, fetched 840/. (4200 dollars) 
at the sale of Mr. Brayton Ives's library in New York, 
in March 1891. A copy, measuring 13! inches by 8f, 
was privately purchased for more than 1000/. by the late 
Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, of New York, in June 1899, of 
Mr. C. J. Toovey, bookseller, of Piccadilly, London. A 
copy measuring 12I inches by 8f, which had long been 
in Belgium, was purchased by Mr. Bernard Buchanan 
Macgeorge, of Glasgow, for 1700/., at a London sale, 
July II, 1899, and was in June 1905 sold, with copies of 
the Second, Third, and Fourth Fohos, to Mr. Marsden 
J. Perry, of Providence, U.S.A., for an aggregate sum 
of 10,000/. On March 23, 1907, the copy of the First 
FoKo formerly in the library of the late Frederick Locker- 

^ The Paris copy was bought at the sale of Samuel Butler, Bishop of 
Lichfield, in 1840, together with copies of the other three Folios; the 
First Folio sold for 1875 francs (75/.) and each of the others for 500 francs 
(20/.). (M. Jusserand in Athenccum, August 8, 1908.) 



568 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Lampson, of Rowfant, and now at Harvard, fetched at 
Sotheby's 3600/. ; this is the largest sum yet reahsed at 
public auction.^ 

The Second Folio edition was printed in 1632 by 
Thomas Cotes for a syndicate of five stationers, John 
The Smethwick, William Aspley, Richard Hawkins, 

Second Richard Meighen and Robert Allot, each of 
° ^°' whose names figures separately with their various 

addresses as publisher on different copies. Copies sup- 
plying Meighen's name as pubHsher are very rare. To 
Allot, whose name is most often met with on the title- 
page, Blount had transferred, on November 16, 1630, his 
rights in the sixteen plays which were first licensed for 
publication in 1623.^ The Second Folio was reprinted 
from the First ; a few corrections were made in the text, 
but most of the changes were arbitrary and needless, and 
prove the editor's incompetence.^ Charles I's copy is 
at Windsor, and Charles II's at the British Museum. 
The 'Perkins Folio,' formerly in the Duke of Devonshire's 
possession, in which John Payne Collier introduced forged 
emendations, was a copy of that of 1632.^ The highest 

^ A reprint of the First Folio unwarrantedly purporting to be exact 
was published in 1807-8; it bears the imprint 'E. and J. Wright. St. 
John's Square [Clerkenwell].' The best type-reprint was issued in three 
parts by Lionel Booth in 1861, 1863, and 1864. A photo-zincographic 
reproduction, by Sir Henry James and Howard Staunton, appeared in 
sixteen parts (Feb. 1864-Oct. 1865). A greatly reduced photographic 
facsimile followed in 1876, with a preface by Halliwell-Phillipps. In 
1902 the Oxford University Press issued a collotype facsimile of the 
Duke of Devonshire's copy at Chatsworth, with introduction and a 
census of copies by the present writer. Notes and Additions to the 
Census followed in 1906. 

^ Arber, Stationers^ Registers, iii. 242—3. 

^ Malone examined, once for all, the textual alterations of the Second 
Folio in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1790). See Variorum 
Shakespeare, 1821, i. 208—26. 

* On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the Athenceum, that this 
copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore 
on the outer cover the words 'Tho Perkins his Booke,' was annotated 
throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. 
Shortly afterwards Collier published all the 'essential' manuscript read- 
ings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shake- 
speare^ Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. 



QUARTOS AND FOLIOS 569 

price paid at public auction is 1350/., which was reached 
at the sale in New York of Robert Hoe's Library on May 
3, 191 1 ; the copy bore Allot's imprint. Mr. Macgeorge 
acquired for 540/. at the Earl of Oxford's sale in 1895 
the copy formerly belonging to George Daniel ; this 
passed to Mr. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island, in 
1905 with copies of the First, Third, and Fourth Folios 
for 10,000/. 

The Third Folio — mainly a reprint of the Second — 
was first published in 1663 by Philip Chetwynde, who 
reissued it next year with the addition of seven ^^j^^ 
plays, six of which have no claim to admission Third 
among Shakespeare's works.-^ 'Unto this im- °^°' 
pression,' runs the title-page of 1664, 'is added seven 
Playes never before printed in folio, viz. : Pericles, Prince 
of Tyre. The London Prodigal. The History of Thomas 
Ld. Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The 
Puritan Widow. A Yorkshire Tragedy. The Tragedy 
of Locrine.' Shakespeare's partial responsibility for 
'Pericles' justified a place among his works, but its six 
companions in the Third Folio were all spurious pieces 
which had been attributed by unprincipled publishers to 
Shakespeare in his lifetime. Fewer copies of the Third 
Folio are reputed to be extant than of the Second or 
Fourth, owing (according to George Steevens) to the 
destruction of many unsold impressions in the Fire of 
London in 1666. On June i, 1907, a copy of the 1663 
impression fetched at Sotheby's 1550/., and on May 3, 
191 1, a copy of the 1664 impression fetched at the sale 
in New York of Robert Hoe's library the large sum of 
3300/. 

A warm controversy followed, but in 1859 Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, of 
the British Museum, in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced 
the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth- 
century hand. 

^ The 1633 impression has the imprint 'Printed for Philip Chetwynde' 
and that of 1664 'Printed for P. C The 1664 impression removes the 
portrait from the title-page, and prints it as a frontispiece on the leaf 
facing the title, with Ben Jonson's verses below. The Fourth Folio 
adopts the same procedure. 



570 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

The Fourth Folio, printed in 1685 'for H. Herringman, 
E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and R. Bentley,' reprints the 
rpjjg folio of 1664 without change except in the way 

Fourth of modernising the spelling, and of increasing 
°^°' the number of initial capitals within the sen- 

tence.^ Two hundred and fifteen pounds is the highest 
price yet reached by the Fourth Folio at public auction. 

^ In the imprint of many copies Chiswell's name is omitted. In a few 
copies the imprint has the rare variant : ' Printed for H. Herringman, 
and are to be sold by Joseph Knight and Francis Saunders, at the Anchor 
in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange.' 



XXIV 

EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND 
AFTER 

Dryden in his 'Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the last 
Age' (1672) ^ expressed surprise at the reverence extended 
to Shakespeare in view of the fact that every 
page in the accessible editions presented some ties^or'" 
'solecism in speech or some notorious flaw in the early 
sense.' Many of the defects which Dryden 
imputed to the early texts were due to misapprehension 
either of the forms of Elizabethan or Jacobean speech or 
of the methods of Elizabethan or Jacobean typography. 
Yet later readers of the Folios or Quartos, who were 
better versed than Dryden in literary archaeology, echoed 
his complaint. It was natural that, as Shakespearean 
study deepened, efforts should be made to remove from 
the printed text the many perplexities which were due 
to the early printers' spelling vagaries, their misreadings 
of the ' copy,' and their inabihty to reproduce intelligently 
any sentence in a foreign language. 

The work of textual purgation began very early in the 
eighteenth century and the Folio versions, which at the 
time enjoyed the widest circulation, chiefly 
engaged editorial ingenuity. The eighteenth- eenth-cen- 
century editors of the collected works en- ^^^^.^ 
deavoured with varying degrees of success to 
free the text of the incoherences of the Folios. Before 
long they acknowledged a more or less binding obligation 
to restore, where good taste or good sense required it, 
the readings of the neglected Quartos. Since 1685, 

^ Dryden's 'Essay' was also entitled Defence of the Epilogue to the 
second part of the Conquest of Granada: see Dryden's Essays, ed. Ker, i. 
165. 

S7I 



572 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

when the Fourth FoHo appeared, some two hundred 
independent editions of the collected works have been 
published in Great Britain and Ireland, and many 
thousand editions of separate plays. The vast figures 
bear witness to the amount of energy and ingenuity 
which the textual emendation and elucidation of Shake- 
speare have engaged. The varied labours of the eight- 
eenth-century editors were in due time co-ordinated and 
winnowed by their successors of the nineteenth century. 
In the result Shakespeare's work has been made intelli- 
gible to successive generations of general readers untrained 
in criticism, and the universal significance of his message 
has suffered little from textual imperfections and 
difficulties. 

A sound critical method was not reached rapidly.^ 
Nicholas Rowe, a popular dramatist of Queen Anne's 
Nicholas reign, and poet laureate to George I, made the 
Rowe, first attempt to edit the work of Shakespeare. 
X 74-171 • jjg produced an edition of his plays in six octavo 
volumes in 1709, and another hand added a seventh 
volume which included the poems (17 10) and an essay 
on the drama by a critic of some contemporary repute, 
Charles Gildon. A new impression in eight volumes 
followed in 17 14, again with a supplementary (ninth) 
volume adding the poems and a critical essay by Gildon. 
Rowe prefixed a valuable life of the poet embodying 
traditions which were in danger of perishing without a 
record. The great actor Better ton visited Stratford in 
order to supply Rowe with local information.^ His 

1 A useful account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare 
is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by the late Dr. 
Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in the Dictionary of 
National Biography supply much information. See also Eighteenth- 
century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith, 1903 ; T. R. Louns- 
bury, The First Editors of Shakespeare (Pope and Theobald), igo6; and 
Ernest Walder, The Text of Shakespeare, in Cambridge History of Litera- 
ture, vol. V. pt. i. pp. 258-82. 

^ John Hughes, the poetaster, who edited Spenser, corrected the 
proofs of the 17 14 edition and supplied an index or glossary {Variorum 
Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 677). 



EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 573 

text mainly followed that of the Fourth Folio. The 
plays were printed in the same order, and ' Pericles ' and 
the six spurious pieces were brought together at the end. 
Rowe made no systematic study of the First Folio or of 
the Quartos, but in the case of 'Romeo and Juliet' he 
met with an early Quarto while his edition was passing 
through the press and he inserted at the end of the play 
the prologue which is met with only in the Quartos. A 
late Quarto of 'Hamlet' (1676) also gave him some sug- 
gestions. He made a few happy emendations, some of 
which coincide accidentally with the readings of the First 
Folio ; but his text is deformed by many palpable 
errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced 
him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis 
personcB to each play, to divide and number acts and 
scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances 
and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and 
grammar he corrected and modernised. 

The poet Pope was Shakespeare's second editor. His 
edition in six spacious quarto volumes was completed 
in 1725, and was issued by the chief publisher Alexander 
of the day Jacob Tonson. 'Pericles' and the Pope, 
six spurious plays were excluded. The 'poems, ^ "i744- 
edited by Dr. George Sewell, with an essay on the rise 
and progress of the stage, and a glossary, appeared in 
an independent seventh volume. In his preface Pope, 
while he fully recognised Shakespeare's native genius, 
deemed his achievement deficient in artistic quality. 
Pope had indeed few qualifications for his task, and 
the venture, moreover, was a commercial failure. His 
claim to have collated the text of the Fourth Folio with 
that of all preceding editions cannot be accepted. There 
are indications that he had access to the First Folio and 
to some of the Quartos. But it is clear that Pope based 
his text substantially on that of Rowe. His innovations 
are numerous, and although they are derived from 'his 
private sense and conjecture,' are often plausible and 
ingenious. He was the first to indicate the ' place ' of each 



574 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

new scene, and he improved on Rowe's scenic subdivision. 
A second edition of Pope's version in ten duodecimo 
volumes appeared in 1728 with Sewell's name on the 
title-page, as well as Pope's ; the ninth volume suppHed 
'Pericles' and the six spurious plays. There were very 
few alterations in the text, though a preliminary table 
supplied a hst of twenty-eight Quartos, which Pope 
claimed to have consulted. In 1734 the pubHsher 
Tonson issued all the plays in Pope's text in separate 
i2mo. volumes which were distributed at a low price by 
book-pedlars throughout the country.^ A fine reissue of 
Pope's edition was printed on Garrick's suggestion at 
Birmingham from Baskerville's types in 1768. 

Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, 
although contemptible as a writer of original verse and 
Lewis prose, proved himself the most inspired of all 

Theobald, the tcxtual critics of Shakespeare. Pope 
I -1744- savagely avenged himself on his censor by 
holding him up to ridicule as the hero of the original 
edition of the 'Dunciad' in 1728. Theobald first 
displayed his critical skill in 1726 in a volume which 
deserves to rank as a classic in English Hterature. The 
title runs 'Shakespeare Restored, or a specimen of the 
many errors as well committed as unamended by Mr. 
Pope in his late edition of this poet, designed not only 
to correct the said edition but to restore the true reading 
of Shakespeare in all the editions ever yet pubKsh'd.' 
There at page 137 appears the classical emendation in 
Shakespeare's account of Falstaff's death ('Henry V,' 
II. iii. 17) : 'His nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled 
of green fields,' in place of the reading in the old copies, 
'His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green 
fields.' ^ In 1733 Theobald brought out his edition of 

1 This was the first attempt to distribute Shakespeare's complete 
works in a cheap form and proved so successful that a rival publisher 
R. Walker 'of the Shakespeare's Head, London' started a like venture 
in rivalry also in 1 734. Tonson denounced Walker's edition as a corrupt 
piracy, and Walker retorted on Tonson with the identical charge. 

2 Theobald does not claim the invention of this conjecture. He 



EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 575 

Shakespeare in seven volumes. In 1740 it reached a 
second issue. A third edition was pubUshed in 1752. 
Others are dated 1772 and 1773. It is stated that 12,860 
copies in all were sold.^ Theobald made a just use of 
the First FoKo and of the contemporary Quartos, yet 
he did not disdain altogether Pope's discredited version, 
and his 'gift df conjecture' led him to reject some cor- 
rect readings of the original editions. Over 300 original 
corrections or emendations which he made in his edition 
have, however, become part and parcel of the authorised 
canon. 

In dealing with admitted corruptions Theobald re- 
mains unrivalled, and he has every right to the title of 
the Porson of Shakespearean criticism.^ His principles 
of textual criticism were as enhghtened as his practice 
was ordinarily triumphant. 'I ever labour,' he wrote 
to Warburton, 'to make the smallest deviation that I 
possibly can from the text ; never to alter at all where I 
can by any means explain a passage with sense ; nor 
ever by any emendation to make the author better when 
it is probable the text came from his own hands.' The 
following are favourable specimens of Theobald's in- 
sight. In ' Macbeth ' (i. vii. 6) for ' this bank and school 
of time,' he substituted the familiar 'bank and shoal of 
time,' and he first gave the witches the epithet 'weird' 
which he derived from Holinshed, therewith supplanting 
the ineffective 'weyward' of the First Folio. In 'An- 

writes 'I have an edition of Shakespeare by Me with some Marginal 
Conjectures of a Gentleman sometime deceas'd, and he is of the Mind 
to correct the Passage thus.' 

^ Theobald's editorial fees amounted to 652/. 10^., a substantial 
sum when contrasted with 36Z. 105. granted to Rowe (together with 
28/. 7^. to his assistant, John Hughes), and with 217Z. 12^. received 
by Pope, whose assistants received 78/. iis. 6d. Of later eighteenth- 
century editors, Warburton received 360/., Dr. Johnson 480/., and 
Capell 300/. Cf. Malone's Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, vol. ii. 
p. 677. 

^ Churton Collins's admirable essay on Theobald's textual criticism 
of Shakespeare, entitled 'The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,' is re- 
printed from the Quarterly Review in his Essays and Studies, 1895, pp. 
263 et seq. 



57^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

tony and Cleopatra' the old copies (v. ii. 87) made 
Cleopatra say of Antony : 

For his bounty, 
There was no winter in't; an Anthony it was 
That grew the more by reaping. 

For the gibberish 'an Anthony it was,' Theobald read 
'an autumn 'twas,' and thus gave the lines true point 
and poetry. A third notable instance, somewhat more 
recondite, is found in 'Coriolanus' (11. i. 59-60) when 
Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version 
'what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or 
eyes] glean out of this character?' Theobald replaced 
the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' (i.e. pur- 
bhnd) , a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare 
had already employed in 'Hamlet' (11. ii. 529).^ 

The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hamner, a country 
gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing 

a large measure of mother wit. He was Speaker 
Thomas of the Housc of Commons for a few months in 
Hanmer 1714, and retiring soon afterwards from public 

life devoted his leisure to a thoroughgoing 
scrutiny of Shakespeare's plays. His edition, which was 
the earliest to pretend to typographical beauty, was 
finely printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744 in 
six quarto volumes. It contained a number of good en- 
gravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hayman, 
and was long highly valued by book collectors. No 
editor's name was given. In forming his text, which he 
claimed to have 'carefully revised and corrected from 
the former editions,' Hanmer founded his edition on 
the work of Pope and Theobald and he adopted many of 
their conjectures. He made no recourse to the old copies. 

^ Collier doubtless followed Theobald's hint when he pretended to 
have found in his 'Perkins Folio' the extremely happy emendation 
(now generally adopted) of ' bisson multitude ' for ' bosom multiplied ' in 
Coriolanus's speech : 

How shall this bisson multitude digest 

The senate's courtesy? — Coriolanus (iii. i. 131-2). 



EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 577 

At the same time his own ingenuity was responsible for 
numerous original alterations and in the result he supplied 
a mass of common-sense emendations, some of which 
have been permanently accepted.^ Hanmer's edition 
was reprinted in 17 70-1. 

In 1747 William Warburton, a blustering divine of 
multifarious reading, who was a friend of Pope and 
became Bishop of Gloucester in 1759, produced 
a new edition of Shakespeare in eight volumes, wLCur- 
on the title-pages of which he joined Pope's f^'^ 
name with his own. Warburton had smaller 
quahfication for the task than Pope, whose labours he 
eulogised extravagantly. He boasted of his own perform- 
ance that ' the Genuine Text (collated with all the former 
editions and then corrected and emended) is here 
settled.' It is doubtful if he examined any early texts. 
He worked on the editions of Pope and Theobald, mak- 
ing occasional reference to Hanmer. He is credited with 
a few sensible emendations, e.g. 'Being a god, kissing 
carrion,' in place of 'Being a good kissing carrion' of 
former editions of 'Hamlet' (11. ii. 182). But such im- 
provements as he introduced are mainly borrowed from 
Theobald or Hanmer. On both these critics he arro- 
gantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface. Most 
of his reckless changes defied all known principles of 
Elizabethan speech, and he justified them by arguments 
of irrelevant pedantry. The Bishop was consequently 
criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious 
incompetence by many writers ; among them, by Thomas 
Edwards, a country gentleman of much literary dis- 
crimination, whose witty 'Supplement to Warburton's 

1 A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from King 
Lear, iii. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar's enumeration of 
various kinds of dogs included the line 'Hound or spaniel, brach or 
hym [or him].' For the last word Hanmer substituted 'lym,' which 
was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound. In Hamlet (iii. iv. 4) 
Hanmer first substituted Polonius's 'I'll sconce me here' for 'I'll silence 
me here' (of the Quartos and Folios), and in Midsummer Night's Dream 
(i. i. 187), Helena's ' Your words I catch ' for ' Yotirs would I catch' (of 
the Quartos and Folios). 



578 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Edition of Shakespeare' first appeared in 1747, and, 
having been renamed 'The Canons of Criticism' next 
year in the third edition, passed through as many as 
seven editions by 1765. 

Dr. Johnson, the sixth editor, completed his edition 
in eight volumes in 1765, and a second issue followed 
Pj. three years later. Although he made some 

Johnson, independent collation of the Quartos and 
1700-1784. j.gg|-Qj.g(^ some passages which the Folios 
ignored, his textual labours were slight, and his verbal 
notes, however feHcitous at times, show little close 
knowledge of sixteenth and seventeenth century litera- 
ture. But in his preface and elsewhere he displays a 
genuine, if occasionally sluggish, sense of Shakespeare's 
greatness, and his massive sagacity enabled him to in- 
dicate convincingly Shakespeare's triumphs of char- 
acterisation. Dr. Johnson's praise is always helpful, 
although his blame is often arbitrary and misplaced.^ 

The seventh editor, Edward Capell, who long filled the 
office of Examiner of Plays, advanced on his predecessors 
Edward ^^ many respects. He was a clumsy writer, 
Capell, and Johnson declared, with some justice, 
1713-1781. ^j^^^ j^g 'gabbled monstrously,' but his collation 
of the Quartos and the First and Second Folios was con- 
ducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than 
those of any of his forerunners, not excepting Theo- 
bald. He also first studied with care the principles of 
Shakespeare's metre. Although his conjectural changes 
are usually clumsy his industry was untiring ; he is said 
to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times. 
Capell's edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes 
in 1768. He showed himself well versed in Elizabethan 
Hterature in a volume of notes which appeared in 1774, 
and in three further volumes, entitled 'Notes, Various 
Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,' which were 
not pubHshed till 1783, two years after his death. The 
last volume, 'The School of Shakespeare,' suppHed 

^ Cf. Johnson on Shakespeare, by Walter Raleigh, London, 1908. 



EDITORS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 579 

'authentic extracts' from English books of the poet's 
day.^ 

George Steevens, a Uterary knight-errant whose satur- 
nine humour involved him in a lifelong series of quarrels 
with rival students of- Shakespeare, made in- George 
valuable contributions to Shakespearean study, steevens, 
In 1766 he reprinted twenty of the plays from ^736-1800. 
copies of the Quartos which Garrick lent him. Soon 
afterwards he revised Johnson's edition without much 
assistance from the Doctor, and his revision, which 
accepted many of Capell's hints and embodied numerous 
original improvements, appeared in ten volumes in 
1773. It was long regarded as the standard version. 
Steevens's antiquarian knowledge alike of Elizabethan 
history and literature was greater than that of any pre- 
vious editor ; his citations of parallel passages from the 
writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in elucidation 
of obscure words and phrases, have not been exceeded 
in number or excelled in aptness by any of his successors. 
All commentators of recent times are more deeply in- 
debted in this department of their labours to Steevens 
than to any other critic. But he lacked taste as well 
as temper, and excluded from his edition Shakespeare's 
sonnets and poems, because, he wrote, 'the strongest 
Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to 
compel readers into their service.' ^ The second edition 
of Johnson and Steevens's version appeared in ten 
volumes in 1778. The third edition, pubHshed in ten 
volumes in 1785, was revised by Steevens's friend, Isaac 
Reed (i 742-1807), a scholar of his own type. The 
fourth and last edition, published in Steevens's lifetime, 
was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. 
As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the 
text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying 

^ Capell gave to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1779, his valuable 
Shakespearean library, of which an excellent catalogue (' Capell's Shake- 
speareana'), prepared for the College by Mr. W. W. Greg, was privately 
issued in 1903. 

^ Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7. 



58o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

those engaged in the same field. With a maHgnity that 
was not without humour, he suppHed, too, many ob- 
scene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that 
he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly 
respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, 
whose surnames were in each instance appended. He 
had known and quarrelled with both. Such proofs of 
his perversity justified the title which Gifford applied 
to him of 'the Puck of Commentators.' 

Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens's quick wit 
and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archae- 
Edmund ologist, without much ear for poetry or delicate 
Malone, literary taste. He threw abundance of new 
1741-1 12. jjgj^^ QT^ Shakespeare's biography and on the 
chronology and sources of his works, while his researches 
into the beginnings of the English stage added a new 
chapter of first-rate importance to English literary 
history. To Malone is due the first rational ' attempt to 
ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shake- 
speare were written.' His earliest conclusions on the 
topic were contributed to Steevens's edition of 1778. 
Two years later he published, as a 'Supplement' to 
Steevens's work, two volumes containing a history of 
the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur Broke's 
'Romeus and Juliet,' Shakespeare's Poems, 'Pericles' 
and the six plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third 
and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens followed, 
and was never closed. In 1787 Malone issued 'A Dis- 
sertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,' tending 
to show that those plays were not originally written by 
Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of Shake- 
speare in ten volumes, the first in two parts. 'Pericles,' 
together with all Shakespeare's poems, was here first 
admitted to the authentic canon, while the six spurious 
companions of 'Pericles' (in the Third and Fourth" 
Folios) were definitely excluded.^ 

^ The series of editions with which Johnson, Steevens, Reed and 
Malone were associated inaugurated Shakespearean study in America. 



EDITORS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 58 1 

What is known among booksellers as the 'First 
Variorum' edition of Shakespeare was prepared by 
Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed, after Steevens's variorum 
death. It was based on a copy of Steevens's editions. 
work of 1793, which had been enriched with numerous 
manuscript additions, and it embodied the published 
notes and prefaces of preceding editors. It was pub- 
lished in twenty-one volumes in 1803. The 'Second 
Variorum' edition, which was mainly a reprint of the 
first, was published in twenty-one volumes in 18 13. The 
'Third Variorum' was prepared for the press by James 
Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson's biographer. 
It was based on Malone's edition of 1790, but included 
massive accumulations of notes left in manuscript by 
Malone at his death. Malone had been long engaged on 
a revision of his edition, but died in 18 12, before it was 
completed. Boswell's 'Malone,' as the new work is 
often called, appeared in twenty-one volumes in 182 1. 

The first edition to be printed in America was begun in Philadelphia in 
1795. It was completed in eight volumes next year. The title-page 
claimed that the text was 'corrected from the latest and best London 
editions, with notes by Samuel Johnson.' The inclusion of the poems 
suggests that Malone's edition of 1790 was mainly followed. This 
Philadelphia edition of 1795-6 proved the parent of an enormous family 
in the United States. An edition of Shakespeare from the like text ap- 
peared at Boston for the first time in 8 volumes, being issued by Mun- 
roe and Francis in 1802-4. The same firm published at Boston in 1807 
the variorum edition of 1803 which they reissued in 1810-2. Two other 
Boston editions from the text of Isaac Reed followed in 1813, one in one 
large volume and the other in six volumes. An edition on original lines 
by E. W. B. Peabody appeared in seven volumes at Boston in 1836. 
At New York the first edition of Shakespeare was issued by Collins and 
Hanney in 1821 in ten volumes and it reappeared in 1824. Meanwhile 
further editions appeared at Philadelphia in 1809 (in 17 vols.) and in 
1823 (in 8 vols.). Of these early American editions only the Boston 
edition of 1813 (in 6 vols.) is in the British Museum. (See Catalogue 
of the Barton Collection in the Boston Public Library by J. M. Hubbard, 
Boston 1880.) The first wholly original critical edition to be under- 
taken in America appeared in New York in serial parts 1844-6 under the 
direction of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786-1870), Vice-Chancellor 
of the University of New York, with woodcuts after previously published 
designs of Kenny Meadows, William Harvey, and others; Verplanck's 
edition reappeared in three volumes at New York in 1847 ^.nd was long 
the standard American edition. 



582 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

It is the most valuable of all collective editions of Shake- 
speare's works. The three volumes of prolegomena, 
and the illustrative notes concluding the final volume, 
form a rich storehouse of Shakespearean criticism and 
of biographical, historical and bibliographical informa- 
tion, derived from all manner of first-hand sources. Un- 
luckily the vast material is confusedly arranged and is 
unindexed ; many of the essays and notes break off 
abruptly at the point at which they were left at Malone's 
death. 

A new ' Variorum ' edition, on an exhaustive scale, was 
undertaken by Mr. H. Howard Furness of Philadelphia, 
The new who between 1871 and his death in 1912 pre- 
Variorum. pared for publication the fifteen plays, 
'Romeo and JuHet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet,' 2 vols., 
'King Lear,' 'Othello,' 'Merchant of Venice,' 'As You 
Like It,' 'Tempest,' 'Misdummer Night's Dream,' 
'Winter's Tale,' 'Much Ado,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'Love's 
Labour's Lost,' 'Antony and Cleopatra,' and 'Cymbe- 
line.' Mr. Furness, who based his text on the First 
Folio, not merely brought together the apparatus criticus 
of his predecessors, but added a large amount of shrewd 
original comment. Mr. Furness's son, Horace Howard 
Furness, junior, edited on his father's plan 'Richard 
III' in 1908, and since his father's death he is con- 
tinuing the series; 'Julius Caesar' was pubHshed in 

1913- 

Of nineteenth-century editors who have prepared 
collective editions of Shakespeare's work with original 

annotations those who have best pursued the 
teenth- exhaustive tradition of the eighteenth century 
editor7 ^^^ Alexander Dyce, Howard Staunton, 

Nikolaus DeHus, and the Cambridge editors 
William George Clark (1821-1878) and WilHam Aldis 
Wright (183 6-1 9 14). All exemplify a tendency to 
conciseness which is in marked contrast with the 
expansiveness of the later eighteenth-century com- 
mentaries. 



EDITORS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 583 

Alexander Dyce was almost as well read as Steevens 
in Elizabethan literature, and especially in the drama 
of the period, and his edition of Shakespeare in nine vol- 
umes, first pubHshed in 1857, has many new and Alexander 
valuable illustrative notes and a few good Dyce, 
textual emendations, as well as a useful glos- ^798-1869. 
sary; but Dyce's annotations are not always adequate, 
and often tantalise the reader by their brevity. Howard 
Staunton's edition first appeared in three jjoward 
volumes between 1868 and 1870. He also was Staunton, 
well read in contemporary literature and was ^ ^°~^ '''^' 
an acute textual critic. His introductions bring together 
much interesting stage history. Nikolaus Dehus's edi- 
tion was issued at Elberfeld in seven volumes ^jijoiaus 
between 1854 and 1861. Delius's text, al- Deiius, 
though it is based mainly on the FoHos, does ^ ^^"^ 
not neglect the Quartos and is formed on sound critical 
principles. A fifth edition in two volumes appeared in 
1882. The Cambridge edition, which first ap- 
peared in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866, Cambridge 
exhaustively notes the textual variations of all ^i^}^°^' 
precedmg editions, and supplies the best and 
fullest apparatus criticus. (Of new editions, one dated 
1887 is also in nine volumes, and another, dated 1893, in 
forty volumes.) ■■■ 

The labours of other editors of the complete annotated 
works of Shakespeare whether of the nineteenth or of the 
twentieth century present, in spite of zeal and othernine- 
learning, fewer distinctive features than those century or 
of the men who have been already named. The twentieth- 
long list includes ^ Samuel Weller Singer (1826, editions. 

^ A recent useful contribution to textual study is the Bankside edi- 
tion of 21 selected plays (New York Sh. Soc. 1888-1906, 21 vols.) under 
the general editorship of Mr. Appleton Morgan. The First Folio text 
of the plays is printed on parallel pages with the earlier versions either 
of the Quartos or of older plays on which Shakespeare's work is based. 
The 'Bankside Restoration' Shakespeare, under the same general 
editorship and published by the same Society, similarly contrasts the 
Folio texts with that of the Restoration adaptations (5 vols. 1907-8). 

* The following English editors, although their complete editions 



584 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

10 vols., printed at the Chiswick Press for William 
Pickering, with a life of the poet by Dr. Charles 
Symmons, illustrated by wood engravings by John 
Thompson after Stothard and others ; reissued in New 
York in 1843 ^.nd in London in 1856 with essays by Wil- 
liam Watkiss Lloyd) ; Charles Knight, with discursive 
notes and pictorial illustrations by William Harvey, 
F. W. Fairholt, and others ('Pictorial edition,' 8 vols., 
including biography and the doubtful plays, 1838-43, 
often reissued under different designations) ; the Rev. 
H. N. Hudson, Boston, U. S. A., 185 1-6, 11 vols. i6mo. 
(revised and reissued as the Harvard edition, Boston, 
1881, 20 vols.) ; J. O. Halliwell (1853-61, 15 vols, folio, 
with an encyclopaedic 'variorum' apparatus of annota- 
tions and pictorial illustrations) ; Richard Grant White 
(Boston, U. S. A., 1857-65, 12 vols., reissued as the 
'Riverside' Shakespeare, Boston, 1901, 3 vols.); W. J. 
Rolfe (New York, 1871-96, 40 vols.) ; F. A. Marshall 
with the aid of various contributors (' The Henry Irving 
Shakespeare,' which has useful notes on stage history, 
1880-90, 8 vols.); Prof. Israel Gollancz ('The Temple 
Shakespeare,' with concise annotations, 1894-6, 40 
vols., i2mo.) ; Prof. C. H. Herford ('The Eversley 
Shakespeare,' 1899, 10 vols., 8vo.) ; Prof. Edward 
Dowden, W. J. Craig, Prof. R. H. Case ('The Arden 
Shakespeare,' 1899-1915, in progress, 31 vols., each 
undertaken by a different contributor) ; Charlotte 
Porter and Helen Clarke ('The First Folio' Shake- 
speare with very full annotation. New York, 1903, 13 
vols., and 1912, 40 vols.); Sir Sidney Lee (The 'Ren- 
aissance' Shakespeare, University Press of Cambridge, 
Mass., 1907-10, 40 vols. ; with general introduction and 
annotations by the editor and separate introductions 

have now lost their hold on students' attention, are worthy of mention : 
William Harness (1825, 8 vols.) ; Bryan Waller Procter, i.e. Barry 
Cornwall (1839-43, 3 vols.), illustrated by Kenny Meadows; John 
Payne Collier (1841-4, 8 vols. ; another edition, 8 vols., privately printed, 
1878, 4to) ; and Samuel Phelps, the actor (1852-4, 2 vols. ; another 
edition, 1882-4). 



EDITORS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 585 

to the plays and poems by various hands ; reissued in 
London as the 'Caxton' Shakespeare, 1910, 20 vols.).^ 

• Finely printed complete (but unannotated) texts of recent date are 
the 'Edinburgh Folio' edition, ed. W. E. Henley and Walter Raleigh 
(Edinburgh, 1901-4, 10 vols.), and the 'Stratford Town' edition, ed. 
A. H. Bullen, with an appendix of essays (Stratford-on-Avon, 1904-7, 
10 vols.). The 'Old Spelling Shakespeare,' ed. F. J. Furnivall and 
F. W. Clarke, M.A., preserves the orthography of the authentic Quartos 
and Folios; seventeen volumes have appeared since 1904 and others 
are in preparation. 

Of one-volume editions of the unannotated text, the best are the 
'Globe,' edited by W. G. Clark and Dr. Aldis Wright (1864, and con- 
stantly reprinted — since 1891 with a new glossary); the 'Leopold' 
from Delius's text, with preface by F. J. Furnivall (1876) ; and the 
'Oxford,' edited by W. J. Craig (1894). 



XXV 

SHAKESPEARE'S POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION IN 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA 

Shakespeare defied at every stage in his career the laws 
of the classical drama. He rode roughshod over the 
unities of time, place, and action. The formal 
speare critics of his day zealously championed the an- 
and the cicnt rulcs, and viewed infringement of them 

classicists. . , ,. -r, 1 r r oi i » 

With distrust. But the force of bhakespeare s 
genius — its revelation of new methods of dramatic art 
— was not lost on the lovers of the ancient ways ; and 
even those who, to assuage their consciences, entered a 
formal protest against his innovations, soon swelled the 
chorus of praise with which his work was welcomed by 
contemporary playgoers, cultured and uncultured alike. 
The unauthorised publishers of 'Troilus and Cressida' 
in 1608 faithfully echoed public opinion when they 
prefaced that ambiguous work with the note : ' This 
author's comedies are so framed to the life that they 
serve for the most common commentaries of all the 
actions of our lives, showing such a dexterity and power 
of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased 
with his comedies.' Shakespeare's literary eminence was 
abundantly recognised while he lived. At the period 
of his death no mark of honour was denied his name. 
Dramatists and poets echoed his phrases ; cultured men 
and women of fashion studied his works ; preachers 
cited them in the pulpit in order to illustrate or enforce 
the teachings of Scripture.^ 

^ According to contemporary evidence, Nicholas Richardson, fellow 
of Magdalen College, Oxford, in a sermon which he twice preached in 
the University church (in 1620 and 162 1) cited Juliet's speech from 

586 



POSTHUMOUS RErUTATION 587 

The editors of the First Foho repeated the contempo- 
rary judgment, at the same time as they anticipated the 
final verdict, when they wrote, seven years after 
Shakespeare's death : ' These plays have had joTson's 
their trial already and stood out all appeals.' ^ tribute, 
Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classi- 
cal canons, was wont to allege in familiar talk that 
Shakespeare 'wanted art,' but he allowed him, in verses 
prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all 
dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome. Jonson 
claimed that all Europe owed Shakespeare homage : 

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, 

To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe. 

He was not of an age, but for all time. 

Ben Jonson's tribute was followed in the First FoHo by 
less capable elegies of other enthusiasts. One of these, 
Hugh Holland, a former fellow of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, told how the bays crowned Shakespeare 'poet 
first, then poet's king,' and prophesied that 

though his line of life went soone about, 
The life yet of his lines shall never out. 

In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on 'the 
great heir of fame ' : 

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones 

The labour of an age in piled stones, 

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid 

Under a star-ypointing pyramid ? 

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame. 

What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name ? 

Thou in our wonder and astonishment 

Hast built thyself a lasting monument. 

These fines were admitted to the preliminary pages of 
the Second Folio of 1632. A writer of fine insight who 

Romeo and Juliet (11. ii. 177-82) 'applying it to God's love to His saints' 
(Macray's Register of Magdalen College, vol. iii. p. 144). 

^ Cf. the opening line of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet on Shakespeare : 

Others abide our question. Thou art free. 



588 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

veiled himself under the initials I. M. S.^ contributed 

rpijg to the same volume even more pointed eulogy, 

eulogies The Opening lines declare ' Shakespeare's free- 

°^'^^'- hold' to have been 

A mind reflecting ages past, whose dear 
And equal surface can make things appear 
Distant a thousand years, and represent 
Them in their lively colours' just extent. 

It was his faculty 

To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates, 
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates 
Of death and Lethe, where confused lie 
Great heaps of ruinous mortality. 

A third (anonymous) panegyric prefixed to the Second 
Folio acclaimed as unique Shakespeare's evenness of 
command over both 'the comic vein' and 'the tragic 
strain.' 

The praises of the First and Second Folios echoed an 
unchallenged public opinion.^ During Charles I's reign 
Admirers ^^^ ^^^^ Unanimity prevailed among critics of 
in Charles tastcs SO Varied as the voluminous actor- 
I's reign, dramatist Thomas Heywood, the cavaher 
lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic recluse John 
Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage 
and court. Sir WilHam D'Avenant. Sir John Suckhng, 
who introduced many lines from Shakespeare's poetry 
into his own verse, caused his own portrait to be painted 
by Van Dyck with a copy of the First FoHo in his hand, 
opened at the play of 'Hamlet.'^ Before 1640 John 

^ These letters have been interpreted as standing either for the in- 
scription 'In Memoriam Scriptoris' or for the name of the writer. In 
the latter connection, they have been variously and inconclusively read 
as Jasper Mayne (Student), a young Oxford writer; as John Marston 
(Student or Satirist) ; and as John Milton (Senior or Student). 

2 Cf. Shakspere's Century of Praise, 1 591-1693, New Shakspere Soc., 
ed. Ingleby and Toulmin Smith, 1879; and Fresh Allusions, ed. Furni- 
vall, 1886. The whole was re-edited with additions by J. Munro, 2 
vols., 1909. 

3 The picture, which was exhibited at the New Gallery in January 
1902, is the property of Mrs. Lee, at Hartwell House, Aylesbury (see 
Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, ed. Wornum, i. 332). 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 589 

Hales, Fellow of Eton, whose learning and liberal cul- 
ture obtained for him the epithet of 'ever-memorable,' 
is said to have triumphantly estabhshed, in a pubHc 
dispute held with men of learning in his rooms at Eton, 
the proposition that ' there was no subject of which any 
poet ever writ but he could produce it much better done 
in Shakespeare.' ^ Leonard Digges, who bore testimony 
in the First Folio to his faith in Shakespeare's im- 
mortality, was not content with that assurance; he 
supplemented it with fresh proofs in the 1640 edition 
of the 'Poems.' There Digges asserted that while Ben 
Jonson's famous work had now lost its vogue, every re- 
vival of Shakespeare's plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, 
and galleries alike.^ At a little later date, Shakespeare's 

^ Charles Gildon, in 1694, in Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer's Short 
View of Tragedy which he addressed to Dryden, gives the classical 
version of this incident. 'To give the world,' Gildon informs Dryden, 
'some satisfaction that Shakespear has had as great a Veneration paid 
his Excellence by men of unquestion'd parts as this I now express of 
him, I shall give some account of what I have heard from your Mouth, 
Sir, about the noble Triumph he gain'd over all the Ancients by the 
Judgment of the ablest Critics of that time. The Matter of Fact (if 
my Memory fail me not) was this. Mr. Hales of Eaton afhrm'd that he 
wou'd shew all the Poets of A.ntiquity outdone by Shakespear, in all the 
Topics, and common places made use of in Poetry. The Enemies of 
Shakespear wou'd by no means yield him so much Excellence : so that it 
came to a Resolution of a trial of skill upon that Subject; the place 
agreed on for the Dispute was Mr. Hales's Chamber at Eaton ; a great 
many Books were sent down by the Enemies of this Poet, and on the 
appointed day my Lord Falkland, Sir John Suckling, and all the Persons 
of Quality that had Wit and Learning, and interested themselves in the 
Quarrel, met there, and upon a thorough Disquisition of the point, the 
Judges chose by agreement out of this Learned and Ingenious Assembly 
unanimously ga,ve the Preference to Shakespear. And the Greek and 
Roman Poets were adjug'd to Vail at least their Glory in that of the 
English Hero.' 

^ Digges' tribute of 1640 includes the lines : 

So have I scene, when Cesar would appeare, 
And on the stage at halfe-sword parley were 
Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience 
^ Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence, 

When some new day they would not brooke a line 
Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline; 
Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz'de more 
Honest lago, or the jealous Moore. . . . 

When let but Falslaffe come, 
Hall, Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have a roome 



590 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

writings were the 'closest companions' of Charles I's 
'soHtudes.' ^ 

After the Restoration public taste in England veered 
towards the classicised model of drama then in vogue 

in France.^ Literary critics of Shakespeare's 
of the work laid renewed emphasis on his neglect of 

toradon ^^^ ancient principles. They elaborated the 

view that he was a child of nature who lacked 
the training of the only authentic school. Some critics 
complained, too, that his language was growing archaic. 
None the less, very few questioned the magic of his 
genius, and Shakespeare's reputation suffered no last- 
ing injury from a closer critical scrutiny. Classical 
pedantry found its most thoroughgoing champion in 
Thomas Rymer, who levelled colloquial abuse at all 
divergences from the classical conventions of drama. 
In his 'Short View of Tragedy' (1692) Rymer mainly 
concentrated his attention on 'Othello,' and reached 
the eccentric conclusion that it was 'a bloody farce 
without salt or savour.' But Rymer's extravagances 
awoke in England no substantial echo. Samuel Pepys 
the diarist was an indefatigable playgoer who reflected 
the average taste of the times. A native impatience of 
poetry or romance led him to deny 'great wit' to 'The 
Tempest,' and to brand 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' 
as 'the most insipid and ridiculous play'; but Pepys's 
lack of literary sentiment did not deter him from wit- 
nessing forty-five performances of fourteen of Shake- 
speare's plays between October 11, 1660, and February 
6, 1668-9, ^^^ oil occasion the scales fell from his eyes. 
'Hamlet,' Shakespeare's most characteristic play, won 

All is so pester'd ; let but Beatrice 
And Benedicke be seene, we in a trice 
The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full 
To hear Malvoglio, that crosse garter'd gull. 

^ Milton, Iconoclastes, i6go, pp. 9—10. 

^ Cf. Evelyn's Diary, November 26, 1661 : 'I saw Hamlet, Prince of 
Denmark, played, but now the old plays began to disgust the refined 
age, since His Majesty's being so long abroad.' 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 591 

the diarist's ungrudging commendation; he saw four 
renderings of the tragedy with the great actor Betterton 
in the title-role, and with each performance his en- 
thusiasm rose.^ 

Dryden, the literary dictator of the day, was a wide- 
minded critic who was innocent of pedantry, and he both 
guided and reflected the enlightened judgment Dryden's 
of his era. According to his own account he verdict, 
was first taught by Sir Wilham D'Avenant 'to admire' 
Shakespeare's work. Very characteristic are his fre- 
quent complaints of Shakespeare's inequalities — ' he is 
the very Janus of poets.' ^ But in almost the same breath 
Dryden declared that Shakespeare was held in as much 
veneration among Englishmen as ^schylus among the 
Athenians, and that ' he was the man who of all modern 
and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most 
comprehensive soul. . . . When he describes any- 
thing, you more than see it — you feel it too.' ^ In 
1693, when Sir Godfrey Kneller presented Dryden with 
a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the poet 
acknowledged the gift thus : 

TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER 

Skakespear, thy Gift, I place before my sight ; 
With awe, I ask his Blessing ere I write ; 
With Reverence look on his Majestick Face ; 
Proud to be less, but of his Godlike Race. 
His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write, 
And I, like Teucer, under Ajax fight. 

Writers of Charles II's reign of such opposite tempera- 
ments as Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, and 

^ Cf. 'Pepys and Shakespeare' in the present writer's Shakespeare 
and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 82 seq. 

^ Conquest of Granada, 1672. 

' Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 1668. Some interesting, if more qualified, 
criticism by Dryden also appears in his preface to an adaptation of 
Troilus and Cressida in 1679. In the prologue to his and D'Avenant's 
adaptation of The Tempest in 1676, he wrote : 

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be; 
Within that circle none durst walk but he. 



592 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Sir Charles Sedley vigorously argued in Dryden's strain 
for Shakespeare's supremacy. As a girl the sober 
duchess declares she fell in love with Shake- 
speare's speare. In her 'Sociable Letters,' published 
fashionable j^ 1 664, she enthusiastically, if diffusely, de- 
scribed how Shakespeare creates the illusion 
that he had been ' transformed into every one of those 
persons he hath described,' and suffered all their emotions. 
When she witnessed one of his tragedies she felt per- 
suaded that she was witnessing an episode in real life. 
'Indeed,' she concludes, 'Shakespeare had a clear judg- 
ment, a quick wit, a subtle observation, a deep appre- 
hension, and a most eloquent elocution.' The profligate 
Sedley, in a prologue to the 'Wary Widdow,' a comedy 
by one Higden, which was produced in 1693, boldly 
challenged Rymer's warped vision when he apostro- 
phised Shakespeare thus : 

Shackspear whose fruitful! Genius, happy wit 
Was fram'd and finisht at a lucky hit, 
The pride of Nature, and the shame of Schools, 
Born to Create, and not to Learn from Rules. 

Throughout the period of the Restoration, the tra- 
ditions of the past kept Shakespearean drama to the 
Restora- ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ stage.^ 'Hamlet,' 'Julius Cassar,' 
tion 'Othello,' and other pieces were frequently 

a apters. produced in the authentic text. 'King Lear' 
it was reported was acted ' exactly as Shakespeare wrote 

^ After Charles II's restoration in 1660, two companies of actors 
received licenses to perform in public : one known as the Duke's company 
was directed by Sir William D'Avenant, having for its patron the King's 
brother the Duke of York; the other company, known as the King's 
company, was directed by Tom Killigrew, one of Charles II's boon 
companions, and had the King for its patron. The right to perform 
sixteen of Shakespeare's plays was distributed between the two com- 
panies. To the Duke's Company were allotted the nine plays : The 
Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth 
Night, Henry VIII, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet; to the King's Com- 
pany were allotted the seven plays : Julius Ccesar, Henry IV, Merry 
Wives, Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Taming of the Shrew, Titus 
Andronicus. In 1682 the two companies were amalgamated, and the 
sixteen plays were thenceforth all vested in the same hands. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 593 

it.' The chief actor of the day, Thomas Betterton, 
won his spurs as the interpreter of Shakespeare's leading 
parts, chiefly in unrevised or slightly abridged versions. 
Hamlet was accounted that actor's masterpiece. 'No 
succeeding tragedy for several years,' wrote Downes, 
the prompter at Betterton's theatre, 'got more reputa- 
tion or money to the company than this.' At the same 
time the change in the dramatic sentiment of the Resto- 
ration was accompanied by a marked development of 
scenic and musical elaboration on the stage in place of 
older methods of simplicity, and many of Shakespeare's 
plays were deemed to need drastic revision in order to 
fit them to the new theatrical conditions. Shakespeare's 
work was freely adapted by dramatists of the day in 
order to satisfy the alteration alike in theatrical taste 
and machinery. No disrespect was intended to Shake- 
speare's memory by those who engaged in these acts of 
vandalism. Sir William D'Avenant, who set the fashion 
of Shakespearean adaptation, never ceased to write or 
speak of the dramatist with afTection and respect, while 
Dryden's activity as a Shakespearean reviser went 
hand in hand with many professions of adoration. 
D'Avenant, Dryden and their coadjutors worked arbi- 
trarily. They endeavoured without much method to 
recast Shakespeare's plays in a Gallicised rather than 
in a strictly classical mould. They were no fanatical 
observers of the unities of time, place and action. In 
the French spirit, they viewed love as the dominant pas- 
sion of tragedy, they gave tragedies happy endings, and 
they qualified the wickedness of hero or heroine. While 
they excised much humorous incident from Shake- 
spearean tragedy, they delighted in tragicomedy in 
which comic and pathetic sentiment was liberally 
mingled. Nor did the Restoration adapters abide by 
the classical rejection of scenes of violence. They 
added violent episodes with melodramatic license. 
Shakespeare's language was modernised or simplified, 
passages which were reckoned to be difficult were re- 

2Q 



594 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

written, and the calls of intelligibility were deemed to 
warrant the occasional transfer of a speech from one 
character to another, or even from one play to another. 
It scarcely needs adding that the claim of the Restora- 
tion adapters to 'improve' Shakespeare's text was un- 
justifiable, save for a few omissions or transpositions of 
scenes.-^ 

D'Avenant began the revision of Shakespeare's work 
early in February 1662, by laying reckless hands on 
'Measure for Measure.' With Shakespeare's ro- 
' revised' mantic play he incorporated the characters of 
versions, Benedick and Beatrice from 'Much Ado' and 
rechristened his performance ' The Law against 
Lovers.'^ D'Avenant worked on 'Macbeth' in 1666, 
and 'The Tempest' a year or two later. In both these 
pieces he introduced not only original characters , and 
speeches, but new songs and dances which brought the 
plays within the category of opera. D'Avenant also 
turned 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' into a comedy which 
he called 'The Rivals' (1668). 

Dryden entered the field of Shakespearean revision by 
aiding D'Avenant in his version of 'The Tempest' which 
was first published after D'Avenant's death with a pref- 
ace by Dryden in 1670. A second edition which ap- 
peared in 1674 embodied further changes by Thomas 
Shadwell.^ Subsequently Dryden dealt in similar fashion 

^ Dr. F. W. Kilbourne's Alterations and Adaptations of Shakespeare, 
Boston 1906. 

^ This piece was first acted at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 
February 18, 1662, and was first printed in 1673. 

* Shadwell's name does not figure in the printed version of 1674 
which incorporates his amplifications. Only Dryden and D'Avenant 
are cited as revisers. Shadwell's opera of The Tempest is often men- 
tioned in theatrical history on the authority of Downes's Roscius An- 
glicanus (1708), but it is his 'improvement' of D'Avenant and Dryden's 
version which is in question. (See W. J. Lawrence's The Elizabethan 
Playhouse, ist ser. 191 2, pp. 94 seq. reprinted from Anglia 1904, and Sir 
Ernest Clarke's paper on 'The Tempest as an Opera' in the Athenmum, 
August 25, 1906). Thomas DufEett, a very minor dramatist, produced 
at the Theatre Royal in 1675 The Mock Tempest in ridicule of the efforts 
of Dryden, D'Avenant and Shadwell. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 595 

with 'Troilus' (1679), and he imitated 'Antony and 
Cleopatra' on original lines in his tragedy of 'All for 
Love' (1678). John Lacy, the actor, adapted 'The 
Taming of the Shrew' (produced as 'Sawny the Scot,' 
April 19, 1667, published in 1698). Thomas Shadwell 
revised 'Timon' (1678); Thomas Otway 'Romeo and 
Juliet' (1680) ; John Crowne the 'First and Second Parts 
of Henry VI' (1680-1) ; Nahum Tate 'Richard II' 
(1681), 'Lear' (1681), and 'Coriolanus' (1682) ; and Tom 
Durfey 'Cymbeline' (1682). ^ 

From the accession of Queen Anne to the present day 
the tide of Shakespeare's reputation, both on the stage 
and among critics, has flowed onward almost ^^^^ 
uninterruptedly. The censorious critic, John 1702 
Dennis, actively shared in the labours of adap- ^'^^^^ ^* 
tation; but in his 'Letters' (1711) on Shakespeare's 
' genius ' he gave his work whole-hearted commendation : 
'One may say of hinx, as they did of Homer, that he 
had none to imitate ; and is himself inimitable.' ^ 
Cultured opinion gave the answer which Addison wished 
when he asked in 'The Spectator' on February 10, 17 14, 
the question : ' Who would not rather read one of Shake- 
speare's plays, where there is not a single rule of the 
stage observed, than any production of a modern critic, 
where there is not one of them violated?' No poet 
who won renown in the age of Anne or the early Georges 
failed to pay a sincere tribute to Shakespeare in the 
genuine text. James Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas 
Gray, joined in the chorus of praise. David Hume the 

^ John Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, revised Julius Casar in 1692, 
but his version, which was first published in 1722, was never acted. 
Post-Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare include CoUey Gibber's 
Richard III (1700); Charles Gildon's Measure for Measure (1700); 
John Dennis's Cojnical Gallant (1702 : a revision of The Merry Wives); 
Charles Burnaby's Love Betrayed (1703: a rehash of AWs Well and 
Twelfth Night); and John Dennis's The Invader of his Country (1720: 
a new version of Coriolanus). See H. B. Wheatley's Post-Restoration 
Quartos of Shakespeare's Plays, London, 1913 (reprinted from The Library, 
July 1913). 

2 D. Nichol Smith, Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903, 
p. 24. 



596 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

philosopher and historian stands alone among cultured 
contemporaries in questioning the justice 'of much of 
this eulogy/ on the specious ground that Shakespeare's 
'beauties' were 'surrounded with deformities.' Two 
of the greatest men of letters of the eighteenth century, 
Pope and Johnson, although they did not withhold 
censure, paid the dramatist, as we have seen, the practi- 
cal homage of becoming his editor. 

As the eighteenth century closed, the outlook of the 
critics steadily widened, and they brought to the study 
The growth increased learning as well as profounder insight, 
of critical Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel College, 
insight. Cambridge, in his 'Essay on the Learning of 
Shakespeare' (1767) deduced from an exhaustive study 
of Elizabethan literature the sagacious conclusion that 
Shakespeare was well versed in the writings of his 
English contemporaries. Meanwhile the chief of Shake- 
speare's dramatis personce became the special topic of 
independent treatises.^ One writer, Maurice Morgann, 
in his 'Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John 
Falstaff' (1777) claimed to be the first to scrutinise a 
Shakespearean character as if he were a living creature 
belonging to the history of the human race rather than 
to the annals of Hterary invention. William Dodd's 
'Beauties of Shakespeare' (1752), the most cyclopaedic 
of anthologies, brought home to the popular mind, in 
numberless editions, the range of Shakespeare's obser- 
vations on human experience. 

Shakespearean study of the eighteenth century 
not only strengthened the foundations of his fame 
Modem ^^^ Stimulated its subsequent growth. The 
schools of school of textual criticism which Theobald 
cnticism. ^^^ Capell founded in the middle years of 
the century has never ceased its activity since their 

^ See William Richardson's Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of 
Some of Shakespeare's remarkable Characters (2 vols. 1774, 1789), and 
Thomas Whately's Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare 
(published in 1785 but completed before 1772). 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 597 

day.^ Edmund Malone's devotion at the end of the 
eighteenth century to the biography of the poet and 
the contemporary history of the stage inspired a vast 
band of disciples, of whom Joseph Hunter (i 783-1861), 
John Payne ColHer (i 789-1883) and James Orchard 
JIalHwell, afterwards Halhwell-PhilHpps (i 820-1 889), 
best deserve mention. 

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century 
there arose a school of critics to expound more system- 
atically than before the aesthetic excellence of xhenew 
the plays. Eighteenth-century writers like aesthetic 
Richardson, Whately and Maurice Morgann ^'^ °° ' 
had pointed out the way. Yet in its inception the new 
aesthetic school owed much to the example of Schlegel 
and other admiring critics of Shakespeare in Germany. 
The long-lived popular fallacy that Shakespeare was the 
unsophisticated child of nature was finally dispelled, and 
his artistic instinct, his sound judgment and his psycho- 
logical certitude were at length established on firm foun- 
dations. Hazlitt in his 'Characters of Shakespeare's 
Plays' (181 7) interpreted with a light and rapid touch 
the veracity or verisimilitude of the chief personages of 
the plays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 'Notes and 
Lectures on Shakespeare' proved himself the subtlest 
spokesman of the modern aesthetic school in this or any 
other country.- Although Edward Dowden in his 

1 W. Sidney Walker (1795-1846), sometime Fellow of Trinity College, 
Cambridge, deserves special mention among textual critics of the nine- 
teenth century. He was author of two valuable works: Shakespeare's 
Versification and its apparent Irregularities explained by Examples from 
Early and Late English Writers, 1854, and A Critical Examination of the 
Text of Shakespeare, with Remarks on his Language and that of his Con- 
temporaries, together with Notes on his Plays and Poems, i860, 3 vols. 
Walker's books were published from his notes after his death, and are 
ill-arranged and unindexed, but they constitute a rich quarry, which 
no succeeding editor has neglected without injury to his work. 

2 See Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets by S. T. Coler- 
idge, now first collected by T. Ashe, 1883. Coleridge hotly reserited the 
remark, which he attributed to Wordsworth, that a German critic first 
taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare (Coleridge to Mud- 
ford, 1818; cf. Dykes Campbell's Memoir of Coleridge, p. cv, and see 
p. 614 note, infra. 



598 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

'Shakespeare, his Mind and Art' (1874; nth edit. 
1897) ^^^ Algernon Charles Swinburne in his 'Study of 
Shakespeare' (1880) were worthy disciples of the new 
criticism, Coleridge as an aesthetic critic remains unsur- 
passed. Among Hving English critics in the same 
succession, Mr. A. C. Bradley fills the first place. / 

In the effort to supply a fuller interpretation of Shake- 
speare's works — textual, historical, and aesthetic — two 
publishing societies have done much valuable 
spKire' work. The Shakespeare Society was founded 
publishing in 1841 by ColHer, Halliwell, and their friends, 

societies •-'-'•' '' 

and published some forty-eight volumes before 
its dissolution in 1853. The New Shakspere Society, 
which was founded by Dr. Furnivall in 1874, issued 
during the ensuing twenty years twenty-seven publica- 
tions, illustrative mainly of the text and of contemporary 
Hfe and literature. 

Almost from the date of Shakespeare's death his native 
town of Stratford-on-Avon was a place of pilgrimage for 
Shake- ^is admirers. As early as 1634 Sir William 
speare's Dugdale visitcd the town and set on record 
Stratford- Shakespeare's association with it. Many other 
on-Avon. visitors of the seventeenth century enthusias- 
tically identified the dramatist with the place in extant 
letters and journals.^ John Ward, who became Vicar 

^ See p. 471, w. 2 supra. As early as 1630 a traveller through the town 
put on record that 'it was most remarkable for the birth of famous 
William Shakespeare' ('A Banquet of Feasts or Change of Cheare,' 1630, 
in Shakespeare's Centurie of Praise, p. 181). Four years later another 
tourist to the place described in his extant diary 'a neat Monument of 
that famous English Poet, Mr. Wm. Shakespere; who was borne heere' 
(Brit. Mus. Lansdowne MS. 213 f. 332; A Relation of a Short Survey, 
ed. Wickham Legg, 1904, p. 77). Sir William Dugdale concluded his 
account of Stratford in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656, p. 523) : 
'One thing more in reference to this antient Town is observable, that 
it gave birth and sepulture to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, 
whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church.' Sir 
Aston Cokayne in complimentary verses to Dugdale on his great book 
wrote : 

Now Stratford upon Avon, we would choose 

Thy gentle and ingenuous Shakespeare Muse, 

(Were he among the living yet) to raise 

T'our Antiquaries merit some just praise. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 599 

of Stratford in 1662, bore witness to the genius loci 
when he made the entry in his ' Diary ' : ' Remember 
to peruse Shakespeare's plays and bee much versed in 
them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter.' ^ 
In the eighteenth century the visits of Shakespearean 
students rapidly grew more frequent. In the early years 
the actor Better ton came from London to make Shake- 
spearean researches there. 

It was Betterton's successor, Garrick, who, at the 
height of his fame in the middle years of the century, 
gave an impetus to the Shakespearean cult at Gamck at 
Stratford which thenceforth steadily developed Stratford, 
into a national vogue, and helped to quicken the popular 
enthusiasm. In May 1769 the Corporation did Garrick 
the honour of making him the first honorary free- 
man of the borough on the occasion of the opening of 
the new town hall. He acknowledged the compliment 
by presenting a statue of the dramatist to adorn the 
fagade of the building, together with a portrait of him- 
self embracing a bust of Shakespeare, by Gainsborough, 
which has since hung on the walls of the chief chamber. 
Later in the year Garrick personally devised and con- 
ducted a Shakespearean celebration at Strat- 
ford which was called rather inaccurately Stratford 
' Shakespeare's Jubilee.' The ceremonies lasted Jubilee,' 
from September 6 to 9, 1769, and under 
Garrick's zealous direction became a national demon- 
stration in the poet's honour. The musical composer, 
Dr. Arne, organised choral services in the church ; there 
were public entertainments, a concert, and a horse- 
race, and odes were recited and orations delivered in 
praise of the poet. The visitors represented the rank 
and fashion of the day. Among them was James Bos- 

(Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. iii.) Edward Phillips, Milton's 
nephew, in his Theairmn Poetarum, 1677, begins his notice of the poet 
thus: 'William Shakespear, the Glory of the English Stage; whose 
nativity at Stratford upon Avon is the highest honour that Town can 
boast of.' 

^ Ward's Diary, 1839, p. 184. 



6oo WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

well, the friend and biographer of Dr. Johnson. The 
irrelevance of most of the ceremonials excited ridicule, 
but a pageant at Drury Lane Theatre during the follow- 
ing season recalled the chief incidents of the Stratford 
Jubilee and proved attractive to the London playgoer.^ 

Like festivities were repeated at Stratford from time 
to time on a less ambitious scale. A birthday celebra- 
tion took place in April 1827, and was renewed three 
years later. A 'Shakespeare Tercentenary Festival,' 
which was held from April 23 to May 4, 1864, was 
designed as a national commemoration.^ Since 1879 
there have been without interruption annual Shake- 
spearean festivals in April and May at Shakespeare's 
native place, and they have steadily grown in popular 
favour and in features of interest.^ 

On the English stage the name of every eminent actor 
since Burbage, the great actor of the dramatist's own 
On the period, has been identified with Shakespearean 
English drama. Betterton, the chief actor of the 
stage, j Restoration, was loyal to Burbage's tradition. 
Steele, writing in the 'Tatler' (No. 167) in reference to 
Betterton's funeral in the cloisters of Westminster 
Abbey on May 2, 17 10, instanced his rendering of 
Othello as a proof of an unsurpassable talent in realising 
Shakespeare's subtlest conceptions on the stage. One 
great and welcome innovation in Shakespearean act- 
ing is closely associated with Betterton's name. The 
substitution of women for boys in female parts was in- 
The fir auguratcd by Killigrew at the opening of 
appearance Charlcs II's rcigu, but Bcttcrton's encourage- 
inShake-^^ mcnt of the innovation gave it permanence, 
spearean The first Toh that was professionally rendered 
^^^^^' by a woman in a public theatre was that of 

Desdemona in 'Othello,' apparently on December 8, 
1660.'* The actress on that occasion is said to have 

^ See Whaler's History of Stratford-on-Avon, 1812, pp. 164-209. 

^ R. E. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 1864. 

3 See pp. 540-1 supra. * See pp. 78-9 supra. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 6oi 

been Mrs. Margaret Hughes, Prince Rupert's mistress; 
but Betterton's wife, who was at first known on the 
stage as Mrs. Saunderson, was the first actress to pre- 
sent a series of Shakespeare's great female characters. 
Mrs. Betterton gave her husband powerful support, 
from 1663 onwards, in such roles as Ophelia, Juliet, 
Queen Katharine, and Lady Macbeth. Betterton 
formed a school of actors who carried on his traditions 
for many years after his death. Robert Wilks (1670- 
1732) as Hamlet, and Barton Booth (1681-1733) as 
Henry VIII and Hotspur, were popularly accounted 
no unworthy successors. Colley Gibber (1671-1757), 
as actor, theatrical manager, and dramatic critic, was 
both a loyal disciple of Betterton and a lover of Shake- 
speare, though his vanity and his faith in the ideals of 
the Restoration incited him to perpetrate many outrages 
on Shakespeare's text when preparing it for theatrical 
representation. His notorious adaptation of 'Richard 
III,' which was first produced in 1700, long held the 
stage to the exclusion of the original version. But 
towards the middle of the eighteenth century all earlier 
efforts to interpret Shakespeare in the playhouse were 
ecHpsed in public esteem by the concentrated energy 
and intelligence of David Garrick. Garrick's enthu- 
siasm for the poet and his histrionic genius riveted 
Shakespeare's hold on public taste. His claim to have 
restored to the stage the text of Shakespeare — purified 
of Restoration defilements — cannot be allowed with- 
out serious qualifications. Garrick had no scruple in 
presenting plays of Shakespeare in versions j^^vid 
that he or his friends had recklessly garbled. Garrick, 
He suppHed 'Romeo and JuHet' with a happy ^717-1779- 
ending; he converted 'The Taming of the Shrew' into 
the farce of 'Katherine and Petruchio,' 1754 ; he was the 
first to venture on a revision of 'Hamlet' (in 1771) ; he 
introduced radical changes in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' 
'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'Cymbeline,' and 'Mid- 
summer Night's Dream.' Neither had Garrick any 



6o2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

faith in stage-archaeology; he acted 'Macbeth' in a 
bagwig and 'Hamlet' in contemporary court dress. 
Nevertheless, no actor has won an equally exalted repu- 
tation in so vast and varied a repertory of Shake- 
spearean roles. His triumphant debut as Richard III 
in 1 741 was followed by equally successful performances 
of Hamlet (first given for his benefit at the Smock Alley 
Theatre, Dublin, on August 12, 1742),^ Lear, Macbeth, 
King John, Romeo,^enry IV, lago, Leontes, Benedick, 
and Antony in 'Antony and Cleopatra.' Garrick was 
not quite undeservedly buried in Westminster Abbey 
on February i, 1779, at the foot of Shakespeare's statue. 
Garrick was ably seconded by Mrs. Clive (1711-1785), 
Mrs. Gibber (1714-1766), and Mrs. Pritchard (1711- 
1768). Mrs. Gibber as Gonstance in 'King John,' and 
Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth, excited something of 
the same enthusiasm as Garrick in Richard III and Lear. 
There were, too, contemporary critics who judged rival 
actors to show in certain parts powers equal, if not 
superior, to those of Garrick. Gharles Macklin (1697?- 
1797) for nearly half a century, from 1735 to 1785, 
gave many hundred performances of a masterly render- 
ing of Shylock. The character had, for many years 
previous to Macklin's assumption of it, been allotted 
to comic actors, but Macklin effectively concentrated 
his energy on the tragic significance of the part with an 
effect that Garrick could not surpass. MackHn was 
also reckoned successful in Polonius and lago. John 
Henderson, the Bath Roscius (1747-1785), who, hke 
Garrick, was buried in Westminster Abbey, derived im- 
mense popularity from his representation of Falstaff; 
while in such subordinate characters as Mercutio, 
Slender, Jaques, Touchstone, and Sir Toby Belch, John 
Palmer (i742?-i798) was held to approach perfection. 
But Garrick was the accredited chief of the theatrical 
profession until his death. He was then succeeded in 

^W. J. Lawrence, The Elizabethan Playhouse and other Studies, 2nd 
ser. 229-230. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 603 

his place of pre-eminence by John PhiHp Kemble, who 
derived invaluable support from his association with one 
abler than himself, his sister, Mrs. Siddons. 

Somewhat stilted and declamatory in speech, Kemble 
enacted a wide range of characters of Shakespearean 
tragedy with a dignity that won the admira- 
tion of Pitt, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, phiHp 
and Leigh Hunt. Coriolanus was regarded as Kemble,^ 
his masterpiece, but his renderings of Hamlet, 
King John, Wolsey, the Duke in 'Measure for Measure,' 
Leontes, and Brutus satisfied the most exacting -^^.^ ^^^^^i 
canons of contemporary theatrical criticism. Siddons, 
Kemble's sister, Mrs. Siddons, was the greatest ^''^^"^ ^'^• 
actress that Shakespeare's countrymen have known. 
Her noble and awe-inspiring presentation of Lady 
Macbeth, her Constance, her Queen Katharine, have, 
according to the best testimony, not been equalled even 
by the achievements of the eminent actresses of France. 

During the nineteenth century the most conspicuous 
histrionic successes in Shakespearean drama were won by 
Edmund Kean, whose triumphant rendering Edmund 
of Shylock on his first appearance at Drury Kean, 
Lane Theatre on January 26, 1814, is one of ^787-1833. 
the most stirring incidents in the history of the English 
stage. Kean defied the rigid convention of the ' Kemble 
School,' and gave free rein to his impetuous passions. 
Besides Shylock, he excelled in Richard III, Othello, 
Hamlet, and Lear. No less a critic than Coleridge de- 
clared that to see him act was like ' reading Shakespeare 
by flashes of lightning.' Among other Shakespearean 
actors of Kean's period a high place was allotted by 
public esteem to George Frederick Cooke (1756-1811), 
whose Richard ni, first given in London at Covent 
Garden Theatre, October 31, 1801, was accounted his 
masterpiece. Charles Lamb, writing in 1822, declared 
that of all the actors who flourished in his time, Robert 
Bensley 'had most of the swell of soul,' and Lamb gave 
with a fine enthusiasm in his ' Essays of Eha ' an analysis 



% 
% 



604 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

(which has become classical) of Bensley's performance 
of Malvolio. But Bensley's powers were rated more 
moderately by more experienced playgoers.^ Lamb's 
praises of Mrs. Jordan (1762-1816) as Ophelia, Helena, 
and Viola in 'Twelfth Night,' are corroborated by the 
eulogies of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the part of 
Rosalind Mrs. Jordan is reported on all sides to have 
beaten Mrs. Siddons out of the field. 

The torch thus lit by Garrick, by the Kembles, by 
Kean and his contemporaries was worthily kept alive 
„,.„. by William Charles Macready, a cultivated 

Charles and conscicntious actor, who, during a pro- 
Macready, fessional Career of more than forty years (1810- 
185 1), assumed every great part in Shake- 
spearean tragedy. Although Macready lacked the 
classical bearing of Kemble or the intense passion of 
Kean, he won as the interpreter of Shakespeare the 
whole-hearted suffrages of the educated public. Ma- 
cready's chief associate in women characters was Helen 
Faucit ( 1 820-1 898, afterwards Lady Martin), whose 
refined impersonations of Imogen, Beatrice, Juliet, 
and Rosalind form an attractive chapter in the history 
of the stage. 

The most notable tribute paid to Shakespeare by any 
actor-manager of recent times was rendered by Samuel 
Recent Phelps (1804-1878), who gave during his tenure 
revivals. of Sadler's Wells Theatre between 1844 and 
1862 competent representations of all the plays save 
six; only 'Richard II,' the three parts of 'Henry VI,' 
'Troilus and Cressida,' and 'Titus Andronicus' were 
omitted. The ablest actress who appeared with Phelps 
at Sadler's Wells was Mrs. Warner (1804-1854), who had 
previously supported Macready in many of Shakespeare's 
dramas, and was a partner in Phelps's Shakespearean 
speculation in the early days of the venture. Charles 
Kean (1811-1868), Edmund Kean's son, between 1851 
and 1859 produced at the Princess's Theatre, London, 

^ Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 seq. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 605 

some thirteen plays of Shakespeare ; his own roles in- 
cluded Macbeth, Richard II, Cardinal Wolsey, Leontes, 
Richard III, Prospero, King Lear, Shylock, Henry V. 
But the younger Kean depended for the success of his 
Shakespearean productions on their spectacular attrac- 
tions rather than on his histrionic efficiency. He may 
be regarded as the founder of the spectacular system of 
Shakespearean representation. Sir Henry Irving (1838- 
1905), who from 1878 till 1901 was ably seconded by 
Miss Ellen Terry, revived at the Lyceum Theatre be- 
tween 1874 and 1902 twelve plays ('Hamlet,' 'Macbeth,' 
'Othello,' 'Richard III,' 'The Merchant of Venice/ 
'Much Ado about Nothing,' 'Twelfth Night,' 'Romeo 
and Juliet,' 'King Lear,' 'Henry VIII,' 'Cymbeline,' 
and ' Coriolanus ') , and gave each of them all the advan- 
tage they could derive from thoughtful acting reinforced 
by lavish scenic elaboration.^ Sir Henry Irving was the 
j&rst actor to be knighted (in 1895) for his services to 
the stage, and the success which crowned his efforts 
to raise the artistic and intellectual temper of the theatre 
was acknowledged by his burial in Westminster Abbey 
(October 20, 1905). Sir Henry Irving's mantle was 
assumed at his death by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, 
who produced three of Shakespeare's plays at the Hay- 
market Theatre between 1889 and 1896 and no less than 
fifteen more at His Majesty's Theatre since 1897. ^^ the 
course of each of the nine years (1905-13) Sir Herbert 
also organised at His Majesty's Theatre a Shakespeare 
festival in which different plays of Shakespeare were 
acted on successive days during several weeks by his own 
and other companies.^ Much scenic magnificence has 
distinguished Sir Herbert's Shakespearean productions 

1 Hamlet in 1874-5 and Macbeth in 1888-9 were each performed by- 
Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession; these are 
the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare's plays are known 
to have enjoyed. 

2 In April 1907 Sir Herbert appeared on the Berlin stage in five of 
Shakespeare's plays, Richard II, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, 
Merry Wives, and Hamlet. 



6o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

in which he has played leadings parts of very varied 
range ; his impersonations include Hamlet, Antony in 
both 'Julius Caesar' and 'Antony and Cleopatra,' Shy- 
lock, Malvolio, and Falstaff. Mr. F. R. Benson, since 
1883, has devoted himself almost exclusively to the 
representation of Shakespearean drama and has pro- 
duced all but two of Shakespeare's plays. Mr. Benson's 
activities have been chiefly confined to the provinces, 
and for twenty-six years he has organised the dramatic 
festivals at Stratford-on-Avon.^ Many efficient actors 
owe to association with him and his company their 
earliest training in Shakespearean parts. In isolated 
Shakespearean roles high reputations of recent years have 
been won by several actors, among whom may be 
mentioned Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson in 'Hamlet' 
(first rendered at the Lyceum Theatre on September 1 1 , 
1897), Lewis Waller in Henry V (first rendered at 
Christmas 1900 at the Lyric Theatre, London), and Mr. 
Arthur Bourchier at the Garrick Theatre as Shylock 
(first rendered on October 11, 1905) and as Macbeth 
(first rendered on January 16, 1907). 

In spite of the recent efforts of Sir Henry Irving, Sir 
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Mr. F. R. Benson, no 
theatrical manager since Phelps's retirement from 
Sadler's Wells in 1862 has systematically and continu- 
ously illustrated on the London stage the full range of 
Shakespearean drama. Far more in this direction has 
been attempted in Germany. The failure to represent 
in the chief theatres of London and the other great 
cities of the country Shakespeare's plays constantly and 
in their variety is mainly attributable to the demand, 
by a large section of the playgoing public, for the 
Spectacular spectacular methods of production which 
settmg of were inaugurated by Charles Kean in the me- 
spearean tropoHs in 1851 and have since been practised 
drama. from time to time on an ever-increasing scale of 
splendour. The cost of the spectacular display involves 

^ See p. 541 supra. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 607 

financial risks which prohibit a frequent change of 
programme and restrict the manager's choice to such 
plays as lend themselves to spectacular setting. In 
1895 Mr. Wilham Poel founded in London 'The Ehza- 
bethan Stage Society' with a view to producing Shake- 
spearean and other Elizabethan dramas either without 
any scenery or with scenery of a simple kind conforming 
to the practice of the Elizabethan or Jacobean epoch. 
Although Mr. Poel's zealous effort received a respectful 
welcome from scholars, it exerted no appreciable in- 
fluence on the taste of the general public.^ In one re- 
spect, however, the history of recent Shakespearean 
representations can be viewed by the literary student 
with unqualified satisfaction. Although some changes 
of text or some rearrangement of the scenes are found 
imperative in all theatrical productions of Shakespeare, 
a growing public sentiment in England and elsewhere 
has for many years favoured as loyal an adherence as 
is practicable to the authorised version of the plays on 
the part of theatrical managers. In this regard, the 
evil traditions of the eighteenth-century stage are well- 
nigh extinct. 

Music and art in England owe much to Shakespeare's 
influence. From Thomas Morley, Purcell, Matthew 
Locke, and Arne to William Linley, Sir Henry in music 
Bishop, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, every dis- ^^'^ ^'■'^• 
tinguished musician of the past has sought to improve 
on his predecessor's setting of one or more of Shake- 
speare's songs, or has composed concerted music in 
illustration of some of his dramatic themes.^ Of living 
composers Mr. Edward German has musically illustrated 
with much success 'Henry VIII' (1894), 'Richard 11/ 
'Richard III,' 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Much Ado.' 
Sir Alexander Mackenzie is responsible for an Overture 

^ See William Pool's Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1913, pp. 203 seq. 

2 Cf. Alfred Roffe, Shakspere Music, 1878; Songs in Shakspere . . . 
set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc. ; E. W. Naylor, Shakespeare 
and Music, 1896, and L. C. Elson, Shakespeare in Music, 1901. 



6o8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

to 'Twelfth Night' and music for ' Coriolanus,' and Sir 
Edward Elgar is the composer of 'Falstaff/ a symphonic 
study (1913). 

In art, the publisher John Boydell in 1787 organised 
a scheme for illustrating scenes in Shakespeare's work 
by the greatest living English artists. Some fine pic- 
tures were the result. A hundred and sixty-eight were 
painted in all, and the artists whom Boydell employed 
included Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas 
Stothard, John Opie, Benjamin West, James Barry, and 
Henry Fuseli. All the pictures were exhibited from time 
to time between 1789 and 1804 at a gallery specially 
built for the purpose in Pall Mall, and in 1802 Boydell 
published a collection of engravings of the chief pic- 
tures. The great series of paintings was dispersed by 
auction in 1805. Few eminent painters of later date, 
from Daniel Maclise to Sir John Millais, have lacked the 
ambition to interpret some scene or character of Shake- 
spearean drama, while English artists in black and white 
who have in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century 
devoted themselves to the illustration of Shakespeare's 
writings include Sir John Gilbert, R.A., Walter Crane, 
Arthur Rackham, Hugh Thomson and E. J. Sullivan. 

In America of late years no less enthusiasm for Shake- 
speare has been manifested than in England. The first 
In edition of Shakespeare's works to be printed 

America, jj^ America appeared in Philadelphia in 1795-6,^ 
but editors and critics have since the middle years of the 
nineteenth century been hardly less numerous there than 
in England. Some criticism from American pens, Hke 
that of James Russell Lowell, has reached the highest 
literary level. Prof. G. P. Baker and Prof. Brander 
Matthews have recently developed more zealously than 
English writers the study of Shakespeare's dramatic 
technique. Nowhere, perhaps, has more labour been 
devoted to the interpretation of his works than that 
bestowed by Horace Howard Furness of Philadelphia 

^ See pp. 580-1 n. i, supra. 



POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION 609 

on the preparation of his ' New Variorum ' edition.^ The 
passion for acquiring early editions of Shakespeare's 
plays and poems or early illustrative literature has 
grown very rapidly in the past and present generations. 
The hbrary of the chief of early Shakespearean col- 
lectors, James Lenox (j8oo-i88o), now forms part of 
the Public Library of New York.^ Another important 
collection of Shakespeareana was formed at an early 
date by Thomas Pennant Barton (1803-1869) and was 
acquired by the Boston Public Library in 1873 ; the 
elaborate catalogue (1878-80) contains some 2500 
entries. Private collections of later periods like those 
formed by Mr. Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode 
Island, Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, and Mr. W. A. 
White, of Brooklyn, are all rich in rare editions. 

First of Shakespeare's plays to be represented in 
America, 'Richard III' was performed in New York 
on March 5, 1750. More recently Junius Brutus Booth 
(1796-1852), Edwin Forrest (1806-1892), John Edward 
McCullough, Forrest's disciple (1837-1885), Edwin 
Booth, Junius Brutus Booth's son (1833-1893), Charlotte 
Cushman (1816-1876), Ada Rehan {b. 1859), Julia 
Marlowe, and Maud Adams have maintained on the 
American stage the great traditions of Shakespearean 
acting. Between 1890 and 1898 Augustin Daly's com- 
pany included in their repertory nine Shakespearean 
comedies which were rendered with admirable effect, 
chiefly with Ada Rehan and John Drew in the leading 
roles. Of late years Shakespearean performances in 
America have been intermittent. Among American 
artists Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) devoted high 
gifts to" pictorial representation of scenes from Shake- 
speare's plays. 

1 See p. 582 supra. 

2 See Henry Stevens's Recollections of James Lenox and the formation 
of his Library. London, 18S6. 



XXVI 

SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 

Save the Scriptures and the chief writings of classical 
antiquity, no Kterary compositions compare with Shake- 
speare's plays and poems in their appeal to 
speare's readers or critics who do not share the author's 
foreign nationality or speak his language. The Bible, 
alone of literary compositions, has been trans- 
lated more frequently or into a greater number of lan- 
guages. The progress of the dramatist's reputation in 
France, Italy and Russia was somewhat slow at the out- 
set. But everywhere it advanced steadily through the 
nineteenth century. In Germany the poet has received 
for more than a century and a half a recognition scarcely 
less pronounced than that accorded him in his own 
country.^ 

English actors who rhade professional tours through 
Germany at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning 
In of the seventeenth centuries frequently per- 

Germany. formed plays by Shakespeare before German 
audiences. At first the English actors spoke in English, 
but they soon gave their text in crude German transla- 
tions. German adaptations of 'Titus Andronicus' and 
'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' were published in 
1620. In 1626 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear,' 'Julius Cassar,' 
and 'Romeo and Juliet' were acted by English players 
at Dresden, and German versions of 'The Merchant of 
Venice,' of 'The Taming of the Shrew' and of the inter- 
lude in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' as well as a 

^ See Prof. J. G. Robertson's 'Shakespeare on the Continent' in 
Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v. chap. xii. pp. 283-308. 

610 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 6ii 

crude German adaptation of 'Hamlet,' ^ were current in 
Germany later in the century. But no author's name 
was at the time associated with any of these pieces. 
Meanwhile German-speaking visitors to England carried 
home even in Shakespeare's lifetime copies of his works 
and those of his contemporaries. Among several 
English volumes which Johann Rudolf Hess of Zurich 
brought to that city on returning from London about 
1614 were Smethwick's quartos of 'Romeo and Juliet' 
(1609) and 'Hamlet' (161 1). The books are still 
preserved in the public library of the town.^ 

Shakespeare was first specifically mentioned in 1682 
by a German writer Daniel Georg Morhof in his'Un- 
terricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie' 
(Kiel, p. 250). But Morhof merely confesses German 
that he had read of Shakespeare, as well as of Shake- 
Fletcher and Beaumont, in Dryden's work 
'Essay of Dramatic Poesy.' Morhof, however, broke 
the ice. A notice of the pathos of ' the English tragedian 
Shakespeare' was transferred from a French translation 
of Sir William Temple's 'Essay on Poetry' to Barthold 
Feind's 'Gedanken von der Opera' (Stade) in 1708. 
Next year Johann Franz Buddeus copied from Collier's 
'Historical Dictionary' (i 701-2) a farcically inadequate 
biographical sketch of Shakespeare into his 'Allgemeines 
historisches Lexicon' (Leipzig), and this brief memoir 
was reprinted in Johann Burckhart Mencke's ' Gelehrten 
Lexicon' (Leipzig, 1715) and in popular encyclopaedias 
of later date.^ Of greater significance was the appearance 
at Berlin in 1741 of a poor German translation of 'Julius 
Caesar' by Baron Caspar Wilhelm von Borck, formerly 

^ See p. 3SS supra. 

2 The purchaser Hess who was at a later date a member of the Great 
Council of Zurich, carried home from London nine English books of 
recent publication. Besides the Shakespearean quartos, they included 
Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) and George Wilkins's novel of Pericles 
Prince of Tyre (1608) of which only one other copy (in the British Mu- 
seum) survives ; see Tycho Mommsen's Preface (pp. ii-iii) to his reprint 
of George Wilkins's novel of Pericles (Oldenburg, 1857). 

* Cf. Zedler's Cyclopaedia 1743 and Jocher's Gelehrten Lexicon (1751). 



6l2 ■ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Prussian minister in London. This was the earhest 
complete and direct translation of any play by Shake- 
speare into a foreign language. A prose translation of 
' Richard III ' from another pen followed in 1 756. Shake- 
speare was not suffered to receive such first halting 
marks of German respect without a protest. Johann 
Christopher Gottsched (i 700-1 766), a champion of 
classicism, warmly denounced the barbaric lawlessness 
of Shakespeare in a review of von Borck's effort in 
'Beitrage zur kritischen Historic der deutschen Sprache' 
(1741). The attack bore unexpected fruit. Johann 
Elias Schlegel, one of Gottsched's disciples, offended 
his master by defending in the same periodical Shake- 
speare's neglect of the classical canons, and within twenty 
years the influential pen of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 
Lessing's came to Shakespeare's rescue with triumphant 
tribute, effect. Lessing first drew to Shakespeare the 
^^^^* earnest attention of the educated German 

public. It was on February 16, 1759, in No. 17 of a 
journal entitled 'Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend' 
that Lessing, after detecting in Shakespeare's work 
affinity with the German Volks-drama, urged his 
superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine 
and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European 
taste, but to all ancient or modern poets save Sophocles : 
'After the "CEdipus" of Sophocles no piece can have 
more power over our passions than "Othello," "King 
Lear," "Hamlet."' Lessing restated his doctrine with 
greater reservation in his ' Hamburgische Dramaturgic' 
(Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols, 8vo), but the seed which he 
had sown proved fertile, and the tree which sprang from 
it bore rich fruit. 

A wide expansion of German knowledge and curiosity 
is traceable to a prose translation of Shakespeare which 
Christopher Martin Wieland (i 733-1813) began in 1762 
and issued at Zurich in 1763-6 (in 8 vols.). Before long 
Wieland's useful work was thoroughly revised by 
Johann Joachim Eschenburg (i 743-1820), whose edition 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 613 

appeared also at Zurich in 13 vols. (1775-7). The 
dissemination of all Shakespeare's writings in a German 
garb greatly strengthened the romantic tendencies of 
German literary sentiment, and the Enghsh dramatist 
soon attracted that wide German worship which ^^^ 
he has since retained. Heinrich Wilhelm von study and 
Gerstenberg in 1766-7, in 'Briefe iiber Merk- ^?^^^- 

1 OT 1 siasm. 

wiirdigkeiten der Litteratur, treated Shake- 
spearean drama as an integral part of the world of nature 
to which criticism was as inapplicable as to the sea or 
the sky. The poet Johann Gottfried Herder in 1773 
showed a more chastened spirit of enthusiasm when he 
sought to account historically for the romantic temper of 
Shakespeare. Goethe, king of the German romantic 
movement, and all who worked with him thenceforth 
eagerly acknowledged their discipleship to Shakespeare. 
Unwavering veneration of his achievement became a 
first article in the creed of German romanticism, and 
the form and spirit of the German romanticists' poetry 
and drama were greatly influenced by their Shake- 
spearean faith. Goethe's criticism of 'Hamlet' in 
'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre' (1795-6) was but one of 
the many masterly tributes of the German romantic 
school to Shakespeare's supremacy.^ 

A fresh and vital impetus to the Shakespearean cult 
in Germany was given by the romantic leader, August 
Wilhelm von Schlegel. Between 1797 and schiegei's 
1 80 1 he issued metrical versions of thirteen translation, 
plays, adding a fourteenth play 'Richard III' in 18 10. 

^ Throughout his long life Goethe was the most enthusiastic of Shake- 
speare's worshippers. In 1771, at the age of twenty-two, he composed 
an oration which he delivered to fellow-students at Strasburg by way 
of justifying his first passionate adoration (see Lewes, Life of Goethe, 
i8go, pp. 92-5). Besides the detailed analysis of the character of Ham- 
let, which occupies much space in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, many 
eulogistic references to Shakespeare figure in Goethe's Wahrheit und 
DichUmg, and in Eckermann's Reports of Goethe's Conversation. A 
remarkable essay on Shakespeare's pre-eminence was written by Goethe 
in 181 5 under the title Shakespeare und kein Ende. This appears in 
the chief editions of Goethe's collected prose works in the section headed 
'Theater und dramatische Dichtung.' 



6 14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Schlegel reproduced the spirit of the original with such 
magical efficiency as to consummate Shakespeare's 
naturalisation in German poetry. Ludwig Tieck, who 
published a prose rendering of 'The Tempest' in 1796, 
completed Schlegel's undertaking in 1825, but he chiefly 
confined himself to editing translations by various hands 
of the plays which Schlegel had neglected.^ Many 
other German translations in verse were undertaken in 
emulation of Schlegel and Tieck's version — by J. H. 
Voss and his sons (Leipzig, 1818-29), by J. W. O. Benda 
(Leipzig, 1825-6), by J. Korner (Vienna, 1836), by A. 
Bottger (Leipzig, 1836-7), by E. Ortlepp (Stuttgart, 
1838-9), and by A. Keller and M. Rapp (Stuttgart, 
18^3-6). The best of more recent German translations 
is that by a band of poets and eminent men of letters 
including Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Ferdinand Freili- 
grath, and Paul Heyse (Leipzig, 1867-71, 38 vols.). 
But, despite the high merits of von Bodenstedt and his 
companions' performance, Schlegel and Tieck's achieve- 
ment still holds the field. Schlegel may be justly 
reckoned one of the most effective of all the promoters 
of Shakespearean study. His lectures on 'Dramatic 
Literature,' which include a suggestive survey of Shake- 
speare's work, were delivered at Vienna in 1808, and 
were translated into English in 181 5. They are worthy 
of comparison with the criticism of Coleridge, who 
owed much to their influence. Wordsworth in 181 5 
declared that Schlegel and his disciples first marked out 
the right road in aesthetic appreciation, and that they 
enjoyed at the moment superiority over all English 
aesthetic critics of Shakespeare.^ In 181 5, too, Goethe 

1 Revised editions of Schegel and Tieck's translation appeared in 
Leipzig, ed. A. Brandl, 1897-9, 10 vols., and at Stuttgart, ed. Hermann 
Conrad, 1905-6. In igo8 Friedrich Gundolf began a reissue of Schlegel's 
translations with original versions of many of the dramas with which 
Schlegel failed to deal. 

2 In his 'Essay Supplementary to the Preface' in the edition of his 
Poems of 1815 Wordsworth wrote: 'The Germans, only of foreign 
nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e. Shake- 
speare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 615 

lent point to Wordsworth's argument in his stimulating 
essay ' Shakespeare und kein Ende ' in which he brought 
his voluminous criticism to a close. A few years later 
another very original exponent of German romanticism, 
Heinrich Heine, enrolled himself among German Shake- 
speareans. Heine published in 1838 charming studies of 
Shakespeare's heroines, acknowledging only one defect 
in Shakespeare — that he was an Englishman. An 
English translation appeared in 1895. 

During the last eighty years textual, aesthetic, and 
biographical criticism has been pursued in Germany 
with unflagging industry and energy; and al- Modem 
though laboured and supersubtle theorising German 
characterises much German aesthetic criticism, shake- 
its mass and variety testify to the impres- speare. 
siveness of the appeal that Shakespeare's work makes 
in permanence to the German intellect. The efforts to 
stem the current of Shakespearean worship essayed by 
the realistic critic, Gustav Riimelin, in his ' Shakespeare- 
studien' (Stuttgart, 1866), and subsequently by the 
dramatist, J. R. Benedix, in 'Die Shakespearomanie ' 
(Stuttgart, 1873, 8vo), proved of no effect. In studies of 
the text and metre Nikolaus Delius (18 13-1888) should, 
among recent German writers, be accorded the first place ; 
and in studies of the biography and stage history Fried- 
rich Karl Elze (1821-1889). Among recent aesthetic 
critics in Germany a high place should be accorded 
Friedrich Alexander Theodor Kreyssig (1818-1879), in 
spite of the frequent cloudiness of vision with which a 
study of Hegel's £esthetic philosophy infects his 'Vor- 
lesungen liber Shakespeare' (Berlin, 1858 and 1874) and 
his ' Shakespeare-Fragen ' (Leipzig, 187 1). Otto Lud- 

fellow-countrymen of the poet ; for among us, it is a common — I might 
say an established — opinion that Shalcespeare is justly praised when he 
is pronounced to be "a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are 
compensated by great beauties." How long may it be before this mis- 
conception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that 
the judgment of Shakespeare ... is not less admirable than his imagina- 
tion ? ' 



6l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

wig the poet (1813-1865) published some enHghtened 
criticism in his ' Shakespeare-Studien ' (Leipzig, 1871)/ 
and Eduard Wilhelm Sievers (1820-1895) is author of 
many valuable essays as well as of an uncompleted 
biography.^ Ulrici's Shakespeare's Dramatic Art' (first 
pubHshed at Halle in 1839) and Gervinus's 'Commen- 
taries' (first pubHshed at Leipzig in 1848-9), both of 
which are familiar in Enghsh translations, are suggestive 
interpretations, but too speculative to be convincing. 
The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaf t, founded at Wei- 
mar in 1865, has pubHshed fifty-one year-books (edited 
successively by von Bodenstedt, DeHus, Elze, F. A. Leo, 
and Prof. Brandl, with Wolfgang Keher and Max Fors- 
ter) ; each contains useful contributions to Shakespearean 
•study, and the whole series admirably and exhaustively 
iUustrates the merits and defects of Shakespearean criti- 
cism and research in Germany. 

In the early days of the Romantic movement Shake- 
speare's plays were admitted to the repertory of the 
On the national stage, and the fascination which they 
German exerted on German playgoers in the last 
stage. years of the eighteenth century has never 

waned. Although Goethe deemed Shakespeare's works 
unsuited to the stage, he adapted 'Romeo and Juliet' 
in 18 1 2 for the Weimar Theatre, while Schiher prepared 
'Macbeth' (Stuttgart, 1801). The greatest of German 
actors, Friedrich Ulrich Ludwig Schroder (1744-1816), 
may be said to have estabHshed the Shakespearean vogue 
on the German stage when he produced 'Hamlet' at the 
Hamburg theatre on September 20, 1776. Schroder's 
most famous successors among German actors, Ludwig 
Devrient (1784-1832), his nephew Gustav Emil De- 

^ See his Nachlass-Schriften, edited by Moritz Heydrich, Leipzig, 1874, 
Bd. ii. 

2 Cf. Sievers, William Shakespeare: Sein Leben und Dichten (Gotha, 
1866), voL i. (all published), and his Shakespeare's Zweite Mittelalter- 
lichen Dramen-Cyclus (treating mainly of Richard II, Henry IV, and 
Henry V), edited with a notice of Sievers's Shakespearean work by Dr. 
W. Wetz, Berlin, 1896. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 617 

vrient (1803-1872), and Ludwig Barnay {b. 1842), largely 
derived their fame from their successful assumptions 
of Shakespearean characters. Another of Ludwig De- 
vrient's nephews, Eduard (1801-1877), also an actor, 
prepared, with his son Otto, a German acting edition 
(Leipzig, 1873, and following years). An acting edition 
by Wilhelm Oechelhauser appeared previously at Berlin 
in 187 1. Thirty- two of the thirty-seven plays assigned 
to Shakespeare are now on recognised lists of German 
acting plays, including all the histories. In the year 
1913 no fewer than 1133 performances were given of 23 
plays, an average of three Shakespearean representations 
a day in the German-speaking regions of Europe.^ It 
is not only in capitals like Berlin and Vienna that the 
representations are frequent and popular. In towns 
like Altona, Breslau, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Hamburg, 
Magdeburg, and Rostock, Shakespeare is acted con- 
stantly, and the greater number of his dramas is regularly 
kept in rehearsal. 'Othello,' 'Hamlet,' 'Romeo and 
Juhet,' 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' 'The Merchant 
of Venice,' and 'The Taming of the Shrew' usually 
prove the most attractive. Much industry and ingenuity 
have been devoted to the theatrical setting of Shake- 
spearean drama in Germany. Simple but adequate 
scenery and costume which reasonably respected archaeo- 
logical accuracy was through the nineteenth century the 
general aim of the most enhghtened interpreters. A just 
artistic method was inaugurated by K. Immermann, 
the director, at the Diisseldorf theatre in 1834, and was 
developed on scholarly lines at the Meiningen court 
theatre from 1874 onwards, and at the Munich theatre 
during 1889 and the following years. A new and some- 
what revolutionary system of Shakespearean represen- 
tation which largely defies tradition was inaugurated in 
1904 by Max Reinhardt, then director of the Neue 
Theater at Berlin, with the production of 'A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream'; from 1905 onwards Rein- 

^ Cf. Jahrbiicher d. Deiitschen Shakes peare-Gesellschaf I, 1894-1914. 



6l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

hardt developed his method at the Deutsche Theater, 
in his presentation of twelve further Shakespearean 
pieces, including ' The Merchant of Venice,' ' Much Ado,' 
' Hamlet,' ' King Lear,' The First and Second Parts of 
' Henry IV ' and ' Romeo and Juliet.' With the help of 
much original stage mechanism Reinhardt made the 
endeavour to beautify the stage illusion and to convey 
at the same time a convincing impression of naturaHsm.^ 
Reinhardt's ingenious innovations have enjoyed much 
vogue in Germany for some eleven years past, and have 
exerted some influence on recent Shakespearean revivals 
in England and America. Of the many German musical 

composers who have worked on Shakespearean 
spearean themes,^ Mendelssohn (in 'A Midsummer 
German Night's Dream,' 1826), Otto Nicolai (in 

'Merry Wives,' 1849), Schumann and Franz 
Schubert (in setting separate songs) have achieved the 
greatest success. 

In France Shakespeare won recognition after a longer 
struggle than in Germany. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619- 
in France, ^^^s), in his tragedy of 'Agrippine,' seemed to 

echo passages in 'Cymbeline,' 'Hamlet,' and 
'The Merchant of Venice,' but the resemblances prove 
to be accidental. It was Nicolas Clement, Louis XIV's 
librarian, who, first among Frenchmen, put on record 
an appreciation of Shakespeare. When, about 1680, he 
entered in the catalogue of the royal library the title 
of the Second Folio of 1632, he added a note in which 
he allowed Shakespeare imagination, natural thoughts, 
and ingenious expression, but deplored his obscenity.^ 
Nearly half a century elapsed before France evinced any 
general interest in Shakespeare. A popular French trans- 
lation of Addison's 'Spectator' (Amsterdam, 17 14) first 



^ Cf. Jahrbtich d. Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1914, pp. 107 seq. 

2 Joseph Haydn composed as early as 1774 music for the two tragedies 
of Hamlet and King Lear {ib. pp. 51-9). 

^ Jusserand, A French Ambassador, p. 56. This copy of the Second 
Folio remains iri the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. See p. 567 supra. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 619 

gave French readers some notion of Shakespeare's 
English reputation. 

It is to Voltaire that his countrymen owe, as he him- 
self boasted, their first effective introduction to Shake- 
speare.^ Voltaire studied Shakespeare thor- 
oughly on his visit to England between 1726 SiSate'.^ 
and 1729, and the EngUsh dramatist's in- 
fluence is visible in his own dramas. His tragedy of 
'Brutus' (1730) evinces an intimate knowledge of 
'JuKus Cassar,' of which he also prepared a direct para- 
phrase in 1 73 1. His 'Eryphile' (1732) was the prod- 
uct of many perusals of 'Hamlet.' His 'Zaire' (1733) 
is a pale reflection of 'Othello,' and his 'Mahomet' 
(1734) of 'Macbeth.' In his 'Lettre sur la Tragedie' 
(1731) and in his 'Lettres Philosophiques ' (1733), 
afterwards reissued as 'Lettres sur les Anglais,' 1734 
(Nos. xviii. and xix.), Voltaire fully defined his critical 
attitude to Shakespeare. With an obstinate per- 
sistency he measur-ed his work by the rigid standards of 
classicism. While he expressed admiration for Shake- 
speare's genius, he attacked with vehemence his want 
of taste and art. 'En Angleterre,' Voltaire wrote, 
' Shakespeare crea le theatre. II avait un genie plein de 
force et de fecondite, de naturel et de sublime ; mais 
sans la moindre etincelle de bon gout, et sans la moindre 
connaissance des regies.' In Voltaire's view Shake- 
speare was, in spite of 'des morceaux admirables,' 'le 
Corneille de Londres, grand fou d'ailleurs.' 

Voltaire's influence failed to check the growth of 
sounder views in France. The Abbe Prevost in his 
periodical 'Le Pour et le Contre' (1738 et seq.) Voltaire's 
showed freedom from classical prejudice in a opponents, 
sagacious acknowledgment of Shakespeare's power. 
The Abbe Leblanc in his 'Lettres d'un Frangais' (1745) 

^ Cf. Alex. Schmidt, VoUaires Verdienst von der Einfilhrung Shake- 
speares in Frankreich, Konigsberg, 1864; Prof. T. Lounsbury,_ Shake- 
speare and Voltaire, 1902, an exhaustive examination of Voltaire's at- 
titude to Shakespeare's work ; J. Churton Collins, Voltaire, Montesquieu 
and Rousseau in England, 1908. 



620 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

while he credited Shakespeare with grotesque ex- 
travagance paid an unqualified tribute to his sublim- 
ity. Portions of twelve plays were translated in De 
la Place's 'Theatre Anglais' (1745-8, 8 vols.), with an 
appreciative preface, and Voltaire's authority was 
thenceforth diminished. The 'Anglomanie' which 
flourished in France in the middle years of the century 
did much for Shakespeare's reputation. Under the 
headings of 'Genie,' 'Stratford,' and 'Tragedie,' Diderot 
made in his 'Encyclopedic' (1751-72) a determined stand 
against the Voltairean position. Garrick visited Paris 
in 1763 and 1764, and was received with enthusiasm by 
cultivated society and by the chief actors of the Comedie 
Frangaise, and his recitations of scenes from Shakespeare 
in the salons of the capital were loudly applauded. 

But Voltaire was not easily silenced. He replied many 
times to the critics of his earlier Shakespearean pro- 
nouncement. His 'Observations sur le Jules Cesar de 
Shakespeare' appeared in 1744 and there followed 
his 'Appel a toutes les nations de I'Europe des juge- 
ments d'un ecrivain anglais, ou manifeste au sujet 
des honneurs du pavilion entre les theatres de 
Londres et de Paris' (1761). Johnson repUed to 
Voltaire's general criticism in the preface to his 
edition of Shakespeare (1765), and Mrs. EHzabeth 
Montagu in 1769 in a separate volume, which was 
translated into French in 1777. Further opportunity 
of studying Shakespeare's work in the French language 
increased the poet's vogue among Voltaire's fellow- 
countrymen. Jean-Frangois Ducis (i 733-1816) metri- 
cally adapted, without much insight and with reckless 
changes, six plays for the French stage, beginning in 
1769 with 'Hamlet,' and ending with 'Othello' in 1792. 
Hisversionswerewelcomedin the Paris theatres, 
French and'wcrc admitted to the stages of other con- 
trans- tinental countries. In 1776 Pierre Le Tourneur 

lations. 1 • 1- n 01 1 5 

began a prose translation of all Shakespeare s 
plays, which he completed in 1782 (20 vols.). In the 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 621 

preface to his first volume Le Tourneur, who was more 
faitliful to his original than any of his French predeces- 
sors, declared Shakespeare to be 'the god of the 
theatre.' Such praise exasperated Voltaire anew. He 
was in his eighty-third year, but his energetic vanity 
was irrepressible and he now retorted on Le Tourneur 
in two violent letters, the first of which was read by 
D'Alembert before the French Academy on August 25, 
1776. Here Shakespeare was described as a barbarian, 
whose works — ' a huge dunghill ' — concealed some pearls, 
whose ' sparks of genius ' shone ' in a horrible night.' 

Although Voltaire's verdict was rejected by the 
majority of later French critics, it expressed a senti- 
ment born of the genius of the nation, and made 
an impression that was never entirely effaced, critics' 
The pioneers of the Romantic School at the gradual 

1 r .1 • 1 , ,1 > emancipa- 

extreme end of the eighteenth century were tionfrom 
divided in their estimates of Shakespeare's yi'^l^'^f-'^ 

^ T • influence. 

achievement. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie- 
Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his 'Essai sur 
Shakespeare,' 1801, incHned to Voltaire's valuation; 
but Madame de Stael in her 'De la Litterature,' 1800 
(i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5), and Charles Nodier in his 'Pensees 
de Shakespeare' (1805) supphed effective antidotes.^ 
None the less, 'at this day,' wrote Wordsworth, as late 
as 181 5, 'the French critics have abated nothing of their 
aversion to "this darling of our nation." "The Eng- 
lish with their bouffon de Shakespeare" is as famihar 
an expression among them as in the time of Voltaire. 
Baron Grimm is the only French writer who seems to 
have perceived his infinite superiority to the first names 
of the French theatre ; an advantage which the Parisian 
critic owed to his German blood and German educa- 
tion.' 2 But the rapid growth of the Romantic move- 

^ See the present writer's Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, 
pp. 1 1 1-3. 

2 Friedrich Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723-1807), for some years a 
friend of Rousseau and the correspondent of Diderot and the encyclo- 



62 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

ment tended to discountenance all unqualified deprecia- 
tion. Paul Duport, in 'Essais Litteraires sur Shake- 
speare' (Paris, 1828, 2 vols.), was the last French critic 
of repute to repeat Voltaire's censure unreservedly, al- 
though Ponsard, when he was admitted to the French 
Academy in 1856, gave Voltaire's views a modified 
approval in his inaugural 'discours.' The revision of 
Le Tourneur's translation by Frangois Guizot and A. 
Pichot in 182 1 secured for Shakespeare a fresh and 
fruitful advantage. Guizot's prefatory discourse 'Sur 
la Vie et les CEuvres de Shakespeare ' (reprinted separately 
from the translation of 182 1 and rewritten as 'Shake- 
speare et son Temps' 1852) set Shakespeare's fame in 
France on firm foundations which were greatly strength- 
ened by the monograph on 'Racine et Shakespeare' 
by Stendhal (Henri Beyle) in 1825 and by Victor Hugo's 
preface to his tragedy of 'Cromwell' (1827). At the 
same time Barante in a study of 'Hamlet' ^ and Ville- 
main in a general essay ^ acknowledged with compara- 
tively few quahfications the mightiness of Shakespeare's 
genius. The latest champions of French romanticism 
were at one in their worship of Shakespeare. Alfred 
de Musset became a dramatist under Shakespeare's 
spell. Alfred de Vigny prepared a version of 'Othello' 
for the Theatre-Frangais in 1829 with eminent success, 
A somewhat free adaptation of 'Hamlet' by Alexandre 
Dumas was first performed in 1847, ^^^ ^ rendering 
by the Chevalier de Chatelain (1864) was often re- 
peated. George Sand translated 'As You Like It' 
(Paris, 1856) for representation by the Comedie Fran- 
faise on April 12, 1856. To George Sand everything 
in literature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare's 
poetry. 

pedistes, scattered many appreciative references to Shakespeare in his 
voluminous Correspondance Litteraire Philosophique et Critique, extend- 
ing over the period 1753-1770, the greater part of which was published 
in 16 vols. 1812-13. 

^ Melanges Historiques, 1824, iii. 217-34. 

2 MSlanges, 1827, iii. 141-87. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 623 

Guizot's complete translation was followed by those 
of Francisque Michel (1839), of Benjamin Laroche 
(1851), of Emile Montegut (1868-73, 10 vols.), and of 
G. Duval (1903 and following years, 8 vols.) : but the 
best of all French renderings was the prose version by 
Francois Victor Hugo (1850-67,) whose father, Victor 
Hugo the poet, renewed his adoration in a rhapsodical 
eulogy in 1864. Alfred Mezieres's 'Shakespeare, ses 
(Euvres et ses Critiques' (Paris, i860), and Lamartine's 
'Shakespeare et son QEuvre' (1865) are saner apprecia- 
tions. Ernest Renan bore witness to the stimulus which 
Shakespeare exerted on the enlightened French mind 
in his 'Caliban suite de la Tempete' (1878). The latest 
appreciation of Shakespeare is to be found in M. Jusse- 
rand's 'Histoire Litteraire du peuple anglais' (1908) : 
it illustrates French sentiment at its best. 

Before the close of the eighteenth century 'Hamlet' 
and 'Macbeth,' 'Othello,' and a few other Shakespearean 
plays, were in Ducis's renderings stock pieces on q^ ^.j^^ 
the French stage. The great actor Talma as French 
Othello in Ducis's version reached in 1792 the ^^^^^' 
climax of his career. A powerful impetus to theatrical 
representation of Shakespeare in France was given by 
the performance in Paris of the chief plays by a strong 
company of English actors in the autumn of 1827. 
'Hamlet' and 'Othello' were acted successively by 
Charles Kemble and Macready; Edmund Kean ap- 
peared as Richard III, Othello, and Shylock ; Miss 
Harriet Constance Smithson, who became the wife of 
Hector Berlioz the musician, filled the roles of Ophelia, 
Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Portia. French critics 
were divided as to the merits of the performers, but most 
of them were enthusiastic in their commendations of the 
plays.^ Lady Macbeth has been represented in recent 

^ Very interesting comments on these performances appeared day 
by day in the Paris newspaper Le Globe. They were by Charles Maginn, 
who reprinted them in his Canseries et Meditations Historiques et Litte- 
raires (Paris, 1843, ii. 62 et seq.) 



624 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

years by Madame Sarah Bernhardt, and Hamlet by M. 
Mounet Sully of the Theatre-Frangais. The actor and 
manager Andre Antoine at the Theatre Antoine in Paris 
recently revived Shakespearean drama in an admirable 
artistic setting and himself played effectively the leading 
roles in 'King Lear' (1904) and 'Julius Caesar' (1906). 
Four French musicians — Berlioz in his symphony of 
'Romeo and Juliet/ Gounod in his opera of 'Romeo and 
Juliet,' Ambroise Thomas in his opera of 'Hamlet,' 
and Saint-Saens in his opera of 'Henry VHI' — have 
interpreted musically portions of Shakespeare's work. 
The classical painter Ingres introduced Shakespeare's 
portrait into his famous picture 'Le Cortege d'Homere' 
(now in the Louvre) } 

In Italy it was chiefly under the guidance of Voltaire 
that Shakespeare was first studied, and Italian critics of 
the eighteenth century long echoed the French 
^^' philosopher's discordant notes. Antonio Conti 
(167 7- 1 749), an Italian who distinguished himself in 
science as well as in letters, lived long in England and 
was the friend of Sir Isaac Newton. In 1726 he pubhshed 
his tragedy of 'II Cesar,' in which he acknowledged in- 
debtedness to 'Sasper,' but he only knew Shakespeare's 
play of 'Julius Caesar' in the duke of Buckingham's 
adaptation. Conti's plays of ' Giunio Bruto ' and ' Marco 
Bruto' show better defined traces of Shakespearean 
study, although they were cast in the mould of Voltaire's 
tragedies. Francis Quadrio in his 'Delia Storia e della 
Ragione d'ogni Poesia' (Milan, 1739-52) thoroughly 
famiHarised Itahan readers with Voltaire's view of 
Shakespeare. Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789), the Anglo- 
Itahan lexicographer, who long hved in England, was 

^ M. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous VAncien Regime, Paris, 
1898 (English translation entitled Shakespeare in France, London, 1899), 
is the chief authority on its subject. Cf . Lacroix, Histoire de VInfluence 
de Shakespeare sur le Thedtre-Franqais, 1867; Edinburgh Review, 1849, 
pp. 39-77 ; and Elze, Essays, pp. 193 seq. Some supplementary infor- 
mation appears in 'Esquisse d'une histoire de Shakespeare en France' 
in F. Baldensperger's Etudes d'Histoire Litteraire, 2^ serie (1910). 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 625 

in 1777 the first Italian to defend Shakespeare against 
Voltaire's strictures.^ 

The subsequent Romantic movement which owed 
much to German influence planted in Italy the seeds of a 
potent faith in Shakespeare. Ippolito Pinde- shake- 
monte of Verona (1735-1828), in spite of his ^p^^^^ 
classicist tendencies, respectfully imitated romantic 
Shakespeare in his tragedy 'Arminio,' and pioneers. 
Vincenzo Monti (i 754-1828) who is reckoned a regenera- 
tor of Italian literature bore witness to Shakespearean 
influence in his great tragedy 'Caius Gracchus.' Ales- 
sandro Manzoni (1785-1873), author of 'I Promessi 
Sposi,' acknowledged discipleship to Shakespeare no 
less than to Goethe, Byron and Sir Walter Scott. 

Many ItaHan translations of separate plays were pub- 
lished before the eighteenth century closed. The French 
adaptation of ' Hamlet ' by Ducis was issued in jjaUan 
Italian blank verse (Venice, 1774, 8vo). trans- 
Soon afterwards Alessandro Verri (1741- ^^^°^^- 
1816), a writer of romance, turned 'Hamlet' and 
'Othello' into Italian prose. Complete translations of 
all the plays direct from the English were issued in verse 
by Michele Leoni at Verona (1819-22, 14 vols.), and in 
prose by Carlo Rusconi at Padua in 1838 (new edit. 
Turin, 1858-9). Giulio Carcano the Milanese poet ac- 
curately but rather baldly rendered selected plays 
(Florence 1857-9) and he subsequently published a 
complete version at Milan (1875-82, 12 vols.). 'Othello' 
and ' Romeo and Juliet ' have been often translated into 
Italian separately in late years, and these and other 
dramas have been constantly represented in the Itahan 
theatres for nearly 150 years. The Italian players, 
Madame Ristori (as Lady Macbeth), Eleonora Duse, 
Salvini (as Othello), and Rossi rank among Shakespeare's 
most effective interpreters. Rossini's opera of Othello 

^ Cf. L. Pignotti, La tomba di Shakespeare, Florence, 1779, and Gio- 
vanni Andres, DeW Origine, Progressi e Slato attuale d'ogni Letteratura, 
1782. 



626 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and Verdi's operas of Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (the 
last two with libretti by Boito), manifest close and appre- 
ciative study of Shakespeare. 

In Spain Shakespeare's fame made slower progress 

than in France or Italy. During the eighteenth century 

Spanish literature was dominated by French 

^^"^' influences. Ducis's versions of Shakespeare 
were frequently rendered on the Spanish stage in the 
native language before the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. In 1 798 Leandro Fernandez di Moratin, the reviver 
of Spanish drama on the French model, published at 
Madrid a prose translation of 'Hamlet' with a life of 
the author and a commentary condemning Shakespeare's 
defiance of classical rule. Yet the Spanish romanticists 
of the earlier nineteenth century paid Shakespeare some- 
thing of the same attention as they extended to Byron. 
The appearance of a Spanish translation of Schlegel's 
lectures on 'Dramatic Literature' in 1818 stimulated 
Shakespearean study. Blanco White issued select pas- 
sages in Spanish in 1824. Jose di Espronceda (1809- 
1842), a chieftain among Spanish romanticists, zealously 
studied Shakespearean drama, and Jose Maria Quadrado 
(18 19-1896), a man of much literary refinement, boldly 
recast some plays in the native language. The Spanish 
critic and poet Menendez y Pelayo (b. 1856) subsequently 
set Shakespeare above Calderon. Two Spanish transla- 
tions of Shakespeare's complete works were set on foot 
independently in 1875 and 1885 respectively; the earlier 
(by J. Clark) appeared at Madrid in five volumes, and 
three volumes of the other (by G. Macpherson) have 
been published. An interesting attempt to turn Shake- 
speare into the Catalan language has lately been init- 
iated at Barcelona. A rendering of 'Macbeth' by C. 
Montoliu appeared in 1908 and an admirable version of 
'King Lear' by Anfos Par with an elaborate and en- 
lightened commentary followed in 1912.^ 

^ A curious imaginary conversation by Sefior Carlos Navarro Lamarca 
on the possibilities of successfully translating Hamlet into Spanish ap- 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 627 

It was through France that Holland made her first 
acquaintance with Shakespeare's work. In 1777 Ducis's 
version of 'Hamlet' appeared in Dutch at in 
the Hague ; ' Lear ' followed nine years later, Holland, 
and 'Othello' in 1802. Between 1778 and 1782 fourteen 
plays were translated direct from the original EngHsh 
text into Dutch prose in a series of five volumes with 
notes translated from Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, 
Warburton, Johnson and Capell. Two complete Dutch 
translations have since been published ; one in prose 
by A. S. Kok (Amsterdam, 1873-1880, 7 vols.), the 
other in verse by Dr. L. A. J. Burgersdijk (Leyden, 
1884-8, 12 vols.). 

In Denmark French classical influence delayed ap- 
preciation of Shakespeare's work till the extreme end 
of the eighteenth century. A romantic school in 
of poetry and criticism was then founded and Denmark, 
in the nineteenth century it completely established 
Shakespeare's supremacy. Several of his plays were 
translated into Danish by N. Rosenfeldt in 1791. Some 
twenty years later the Danish actor Peter Foersom, 
who was a disciple of the German actor Schroder, 
secured for Shakespearean drama a chief place in the 
Danish theatre. Many of the tragedies were rendered 
into Danish by Foersom with the aid of P. F. Wulff 
(Copenhagen, 1807-25, 7 vols.). Their labours were 
revised and completed by E. Lembcke (Copenhagen, 
1868-73, 18 vols.). Georg Brandes, the' Danish critic, 
pubhshed in 1895 at Copenhagen a Danish study of 
Shakespeare which at once won a high place in critical 
literature, and was translated into Enghsh, French and 
German. 

In Sweden a complete translation by C. A. Hagberg 
appeared at Lund in 1847-51 (12 vols.) and a valuable 

peared in the Spanish magazine Helios, Madrid, July 1903. The sup- 
posed interlocutors are Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Librarian of the 
British Museum, the present writer, and Lopez and Gonzales, two pre- 
tended Spanish students. See also Helios, January 1904. 



628 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

biography by H. W. Schiick at Stockholm in 1883. 
In An interesting version of the 'Sonnets' by 

Sweden. Q ^ Nyblom came out at Upsala in 187 1. 

In Eastern Europe/ Shakespeare's plays became 
known rather earlier than in Scandinavia, mainly 
In through French translations. The Russian 

Russia. dramatist Alexander Soumarakov published 
in Petrograd as early as 1748 a version of 'Hamlet' in 
Russian verse which was acted in the Russian capital 
two years later. The work was based on De la Place's 
free French rendering of Shakespeare's play. In 1783 
' Richard III ' was rendered into Russian with the help 
of Le Tourneur's more literal French prose. The 
Empress Catherine II in 1786 encouraged the incipient 
Shakespearean vogue by converting Eschenburg's Ger- 
man rendering of the 'Merry Wives' into a Russian 
farce .^ In the same year she introduced many Shake- 
spearean touches through the German into two Russian 
history plays called respectively 'Rurik' and 'Oleg,' 
and she prepared a liberal adaptation of 'Timon of 
Athens.' 

Shakespeare found his first whole-hearted Russian 
champion in N. Karamzine, a foe to French classicism 
who, having learned Shakespeare's language 
Russian ^^ ^ ^isit to this country, turned 'Julius 
romantic Caesar' from English into Russian prose at 
movemen ]y[Qg(^Q^ [j^ 1 787. A preface claims for Shake- 
Shake- speare complete insight into human nature. 
speare. ga^j-jy [^ ^he nineteenth century the tragedies 
'Othello,' 'Lear,' 'Hamlet' were rendered into Russian 
from the French of Ducis and were acted with great 
success on Russian stages. The romantic movement in 
Russian literature owed much to the growing worship 
and study of Shakespeare. Pushkin learnt English in 

^ See Andre Lirondelle, Shakespeare en Russie, 1748-1840, Paris, 1912. 

2 The scene of the piece was transferred to St. Petersburg [Petrograd], 
and the characters bore Russian names ; FalstafE becomes lakov Vlasie- 
vitch Polkadov. 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 629 

order to read Shakespeare and Byron in the original, 
and his Russian plays are dyed in Shakespearean colours. 
Lermontov poured contempt on the French version of 
Ducis and insisted that Shakespearean drama must be 
studied as it came from the author's pen. Tourgeniev 
and the younger romanticists were deeply indebted to 
Shakespeare's inspiration. At the instigation of Be- 
Unsky, the chief of Russian critics, a scholarly transla- 
tion into Russian prose was begun by N. Retzcher in 
1841 ; eighteen plays appeared at Moscow (8 vols. 
1841-50), and the work was completed in a new edition 
(Moscow, 9 vols. 1862-79). In 1865 there appeared at 
Petrograd the best translation in verse (direct from the 
Enghsh) by Nekrasow and Gerbel. Gerbel also issued 
a Russian translation of the 'Sonnets' in 1880. An- 
other rendering of all the plays by P. A. Kanshin, 12 
vols., followed in 1893. A new verse translation by 
various hands, edited by Professor Vengerov of Petro- 
grad, with critical essays, notes, and a vast number of 
illustrations, appeared there in 1902-4 (5 vols. 4to). 
More recent are the translations of A. L. Sokolovski 
(Petrograd, 1913, 12 vols.) and of A. E. Gruzinski 
(INIoscow, 1 9 13, 3 vols.). Almost every play has been 
represented in Russian on the Russian stage ; and a 
large critical literature attests the general enthusiasm. 
The Grand Duke Constantine Cons tan tinovitch privately 
issued at Petrograd in three sumptuous volumes in 1899- 
1900 a Russian translation of ' Hamlet' with exhaustive 
notes and commentary in the Russian language ; the work 
was dedicated to the widow of Tsar Alexander III.^ 

A somewhat perverse protest against the Russian 
idoHsation of Shakespeare was launched by Count Leo 
Tolstoy in his decHning days. In 1906 Tolstoy Tolstoy's 
pubHshed an elaborate monograph on Shake- attack, 
speare in which he angrily denounced the ^^° ' 
Enghsh dramatist as an eulogist of wealth and rank and 
a contemner of poverty and humble station. Nor would 

1 The Grand Duke presented a copy to the library of Shakespeare's 
Birthplace at Stratford. 



630 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Tolstoy allow the English dramatist genuine poetic 
thought or power of characterisation. But throughout 
his philippic Tolstoy shows radical defects of judgment. 
After a detailed comparison of the old play of 'King 
Leir' with Shakespeare's finished tragedy of 'Lear' 
he pronounces in favour of the earlier production.^ 

In Poland the study of Shakespeare followed much the 
same course as in Russia. The last King of the country, 
Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski (173 2-1 798), 
while in England from February to June 1754 
first saw a play of Shakespeare on the stage ; he there- 
upon abandoned all classical prejudices and became for 
life an ardent worshipper of Shakespeare's work and 
art.^ After his accession to the PoHsh throne in 1764 he 
found opportunities of disseminating his faith among his 
fellow countrymen, and the nobility of Poland soon 
idoHsed the EngHsh poet.^ 

^ See Tolstoy's Shakespeare, trad, de Russe par J. W. Biensto'ck (Paris, 
igo6) ; and Joseph B. Mayor, Tolstoi as Shakespearean Critic (in Trans. 
Roy. Soc. Lit. 1908, 2nd ser. vol. 28, pt. i. pp. 23-55). Prof. Leo Wiener 
in his An Interpretation of the Russian People (New York, i9_i5,_pp. 187- 
91) supplies the best refutation of Tolstoy's verdict in a description of the 
strong sympathetic interest excited in a Russian peasant girl at a Sunday 
School by a reading of a Russian translation of Shakespeare's King Lear. 
Tolstoy selects the identical play for special condemnation. 

2 See Poniatowski's Memoires, ed. Serge Goriainow, Petrograd, 1914; 
i. 1 1 2-3. In 1753 Poniatowski translated into French some scenes from 
Julius CcEsar; the manuscript survives in the Czartoryski Museum at 
Cracow and was printed by Dr. Bernacki in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1906), 
xlii. 186-202. 

3 The Polish princess, Isabella wife of Prince Adam Czartoryski, 
visited Stratford-on-Avon in July 1790 and on November 28 following, 
her secretary. Count Orlovski, purchased on her behalf for 20 guineas a 
damaged arm-chair at Shakespeare's Birthplace which was reported to 
have belonged to the poet. The vendor was Thomas Hart, who was then 
both tenant and owner of the Birthplace. A long account of the trans- 
action at the Birthplace is in the Sanders MS. 1191. (See also George 
Burnet's View of the Present State of Poland, 1807, and Gent. Mag. May 
1 81 5.) The descendants of the princess long preserved the chair in a 
museum known as 'Das Gothische Haus' erected by her in the grounds 
of her chateau at Pulawy (Nova Alexandrova) near Lublin, together with 
an attestation of the chair's authenticity which was signed at Stratford 
on June 17, 1791, by J. Jordan, Thomas Hart, and Austin Warrilow. 
The chair is described in their certificate, a copy of which has been com- 



SHAKESPEARE'S FOREIGN VOGUE 631 

German actors seem to have first performed Shake- 
speare's plays at Warsaw, where they produced 'Romeo 
and JuUet' in 1775 and 'Hamlet' in 1781. p^ugj^ 
A Polish translation through the French of trans- 
' Merry Wives' appeared in 1782, and 'Hamlet' '^^''''''• 
was acted in a Pohsh translation of the German actor 
Schroder's version at Lemberg in 1797. As many as 
sixteen plays now hold a recognised place among Polish 
acting plays. A Polish translation of Shakespeare's 
collected works appeared at Warsaw in 1875 (edited by 
the Pohsh poet Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski), and was long 
reckoned among the most successful renderings in a 
foreign tongue. It has been lately superseded by a 
fresh translation by eight prominent Pohsh men of 
letters, which was completed in twelve volumes in 1913 
under the editorship of Prof. Roman Dyboski, professor 
of Enghsh Language and Literature at Cracow.^ 

In Hungary, Shakespeare's greatest works have since 
the beginning of the nineteenth century enjoyed the 
enthusiastic regard of both students and play- in 
goers. 'Romeo and Juhet' was translated Hungary, 
into Hungarian in 1786 and 'Hamlet' in 1790. In 
1830, 1845, 3.nd 1848, efforts were made to issue complete 
translations, but only portions were pubhshed. The 
first complete translation into Hungarian appeared at 
Budapest under the auspices of the Kisfaludy Society 
(1864-78, 19 vols.). At the National Theatre at Buda- 
pest twenty-two plays have been of late included in the 
repertory.^ . 

Other complete translations have been published in 

municated to the present writer, as 'an ancient back chair, commonly 
called Shakespeare's chair, which at this time is much deformed owing 
to its being cut to pieces and carried away by travellers.' 

^ Dr. Bernacki, vice-custodian of the Ossolinski Institute at Lemberg, 
adds a valuable account of Shakespeare in Poland down to the destruc- 
tion of Polish independence in 1798. 

2 See August Greguss's Shakspere . . . els'6 kotet: Shakspere pdlyaja, 
Budapest, 1880 (an account of Shakespeare in Hungarian), and Shake- 
speare Drdmdi Hazdiik Ban (a full bibliography with criticisms of Hun- 
garian renderings of Shakespeare), by J. Bayer, 2 vols. Budapest, 1909. 



632 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Bohemian (Prague, 1856-74), and Finnish (Helsingfors, 
1892-5). In Armenian, three plays ('Hamlet,' in other 
'Romeo and Juliet,' and 'As You Like It') countries, 
have been issued. Separate plays have appeared in 
Welsh, Portuguese, Friesic, Flemish, Servian, Rouma- 
nian, Maltese, Ukrainian, Wallachian, Croatian, modern 
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese ; while a 
few have been rendered into Bengali, Hindustani, 
Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kanarese, and 
other languages of India, and have been acted in native 
theatres. 



XXVII 

GENERAL ESTIMATE 

The study of Shakespeare's biography in the Hght of 
contemporary literary history shows that his practical 
experiences and fortunes closely resembled „, , 
those of the many who in his epoch followed the speare's 
profession of dramatist. His conscious aims fhebio'?^ 
and practices seem indistinguishable from those graphic 
of contemporary men of letters. It is beyond ^'^^^' 
the power of biographical research to determine the final 
or efficient cause of his poetic individuality. Yet the 
conception of his dramatic and poetic powers grows 
more real and actual after the features in his life and 
character which set him on a level with other men have 
been precisely defined by the biographer. The infinite 
difference between his endeavours and those of his 
fellows was due to the magical and involuntary working 
of genius, which, since the birth of poetry, has owned 
as large a charter as the wind to blow on whom it pleases. 
The literary history of the world proves the hopelessness 
of seeking in biographical data, or in the facts of every- 
day business, the secret springs of poetic inspiration. 

Emerson's famous aphorism — ' Shakespeare is the 
only biographer of Shakespeare ' — seems, until it be 
submitted to a radical qualification, to rest on . 
a profound misapprehension. An unquestion- personal 
able characteristic of Shakespeare's art is its aspect of 

mi 1 • 1 ■ • -his art. 

impersonahty. The plam and positive refer- 
ences in the plays to Shakespeare's personal experiences 
either at Stratford-on-Avon or in London are rare and 
fragmentary, and nowhere else can we point with con- 
fidence to any autobiographic revelations. As a drama- 

633 



634 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

tist Shakespeare lay under the obHgation of investing a 
great crowd of characters with all phases of sentiment 
and passion, and no critical test has yet been found 
whereby to disentangle Shakespeare's personal feelings 
or opinions from those which he imputes to the creatures 
of his dramatic world. It was contrary to Shakespeare's 
dramatic aim to label or catalogue in drama his private 
sympathies or antipathies. The most psychological of 
English poets and a dramatic artist of no mean order, 
Robert Browning, bluntly declared that Shakespeare 
'ne'er so little' at any point in his work 'left his bosom's 
gate ajar.' Even in the 'Sonnets' lyric emotion seems 
to Browning to be transfused by dramatic instinct. It is 
possible to deduce from his plays a broad practical philos- 
ophy which is alive with an active moral sense. But we 
seek in vain for any self-evident revelation of personal 
experience of emotion or passion.^ 

Many forces went to the making of Shakespeare's 
mighty achievement. His national affinities lie on 
Domestic the surfacc. A love of his own country and 
and foreign a Confident faith in its destiny find exalted 

influences • . i. ■, t^'ii j-ji. 

and expression m his work. Especially did he 

affinities, interpret to perfection the humour peculiar 
to his race. His drama was cast in a mould which 
English predecessors had invented. But he is free of all 
taint of insularity. His lot was thrown in the full current 
of the intellectual and artistic movement known as the 
Renaissance, which taking its rise in Italy of the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries was in his lifetime still 
active in every country of western Europe. He shared 
in the great common stock of thought and aspiration — 
in the certain hope of intellectual enfranchisement and 
in the enthusiastic recognition of the beauty of the world 
and humanity — to which in his epoch authors of all 
countries under the sway of the Renaissance enjoyed 
access. 

^ See the present writer's The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art 
(English Association, Leaflet xiii, July 1909). 



GENERAL ESTIMATE 635 

Like all great poets Shakespeare was not merely 
gifted with a supreme capacity for observing what was 
passing about him in nature and human Hfe, but he was 
endowed w^ith the rare power of assimilating with rapidity 
the fruits of reading. Literary study rendered his im- 
agination the more productive and robust. His genius 
caught hght and heat from much foreign as well as 
domestic Hterature. But he had the faculty of trans- 
muting in the crucible of his mind the thought and 
style of others into new substance of an unprecedented 
richness. His mind may best be likened to a highly 
sensitised photographic plate, which need only be ex- 
posed for however brief a period to anything in life or 
literature, in order to receive upon its surface ^^^^ 
the firm outhne of a picture which could be speare's 
developed and reproduced at will. If Shake- [^^^^y^^ 
speare's mind came in contact in an alehouse 
with a burly, good-humoured toper, the conception of a 
Falstaff found instantaneous admission to his brain. 
The character had revealed itself to him in most of its 
involutions, as quickly as his eye caught sight of its 
external form, and his ear caught the sound of the 
voice. Books offered Shakespeare the same opportunity 
of reahsing human Hfe and experience. A hurried peru- 
sal of an Itahan story of a Jew in Venice conveyed to 
him the mental picture of Shylock, with all his racial 
temperament in energetic action, and all the background 
of Venetian scenery and society accurately defined. A 
few hours spent over Plutarch's 'Lives' brought into 
being in Shakespeare's brain the true aspects of Roman 
character and Roman inspiration. Whencesoever the 
external impressions came, whether from the world 
of books or the world of living men, the same mental 
process was at work, the same visualising instinct 
which made the thing, which he saw or read of, a Hving 
and a lasting reality. 

No analysis of the final fruits of Shakespeare's genius 
can be adequate. In knowledge of human character, 



636 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

in perception and portrayal of the workings of passion, 
in wealth of humour, in fertility of fancy, and in sound- 
ness of judgment, he has no rival. It is true 
estimate of him, as of no other writer, that his lan- 
ofhis guage and versification adapt themselves to 

every phase of sentiment, and sound every note 
in the scale of felicity. Some defects are to be acknow- 
ledged, but they sink into insignificance when they 
are measured by the magnitude of his achievement. 
Sudden transitions, elliptical expressions, mixed meta- 
phors, verbal quibbles, and fantastic conceits at times 
create an atmosphere of obscurity. The student is 
perplexed, too, by obsolete words and by some hope- 
lessly corrupt readings. But when the whole of Shake- 
speare's vast work is scrutinised with due attention, the 
glow of his imagination is seen to leave few passages 
wholly unillumined. Some of his plots are hastily con- 
structed and inconsistently developed, but the intensity 
of thQ interest with which he contrives to invest the 
personaHty of his heroes and heroines triumphs over 
halting or digressive treatment of the story in which 
they have their being. Although he was versed in the 
technicalities of stagecraft, he occasionally disregarded 
its elementary conditions. The success of his present- 
ments of human hfe and character depended indeed 
little on his manipulation of theatrical machinery. His 
unassailable supremacy springs from the versatile work- 
ing of his intellect and imagination, by virtue of which 
his pen limned with unerring precision almost every 
gradation of thought and emotion that animates the 
living stage of the world. 

Shakespeare, as Hazlitt suggested, ultimately came to 
know how human faculty and feeling would develop 
His final ^^ ^^y conceivable change of fortune on the 
achieve- highways of life. His great characters give 
™^°'^' voice to thought or passion with an individu- 

ality and a naturalness that commonly rouse in the 
intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they 



GENER/VL ESTIMATE 637 

are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditat- 
ingly among themselves, rather than that they are 
reading written speeches or hearing written speeches 
recited. The more closely the words are studied, the 
completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagina- 
tion — fairies, ghosts, witches — are dehneated with a 
Hke potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinc- 
tively that these supernatural entities could not speak, 
feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. 
The creative power of poetry was never manifested to 
such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which 
Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air. 

So mighty a faculty sets at naught the common limita- 
tions of nationahty, and in every quarter of the globe 
to which civilised life has penetrated Shake- 
speare's power is recognised. All the world universal 
over, language is applied to his creations that recogni- 
ordinarily applies to beings of flesh and blood. 
Hamlet and Othello, Lear and Macbeth, Falstaff and 
Shylock, Brutus and Romeo, Ariel and Caliban are 
studied in almost every civilised tongue as if they were 
historic personalities, and the chief of the impressive 
phrases that fall from their Hps are rooted in the speech 
of civilised humanity. To Shakespeare the intellect 
of the world, speaking in divers accents, applies with 
one accord his own words : ' How noble in reason ! how 
infinite in faculty ! in apprehension how Hke a god ! ' 
The prince of French romancers, the elder Dumas, set 
the English dramatist next to God in the cosmic system ; 
'after God,' wrote Dumas, 'Shakespeare has created 
most.' 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 



THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 

The scantiness of contemporary records of Shakespeare's career 
has been much exaggerated. An investigation extending over 
two centuries has brought together a mass of detaU contempo- 
which far exceeds that accessible in the case of any rary records 
other contemporary' professional writer. Nevertheless, ^^^u^'^^nt. 
a few links are missing, and at some points appeal to conjecture 
is inevitable. But the fully ascertained facts are numerous enough 
to define sharply the general direction that Shakespeare's career 
followed. Although the clues are in some places faint, the traU 
never eludes the patient investigator. 

Fuller, in his 'Worthies' (1662), attempted the first biographical 
notice of Shakespeare, with poor results. Aubrey, the Oxford 
antiquary, in his gossiping 'Lives of Eminent Men,' ^ ^.j^.^^ 
based his ampler information on reports communicated efforts in 
to him by William Beeston {d. 1682), an aged actor, biography, 
whom Dryden called 'the chronicle of the stage,' and who was 
doubtless in the main a trustworthy witness. Beeston's father, 
Christopher Beeston, was a member of Shakespeare's company 
of actors, and he for a long period was himself connected with 
the stage. Beeston's friend, John Lacy, an actor of the Resto- 
ration, also supphed Aubrey with further information.^ A few 
additional details were recorded in the seventeenth century by the 
Rev. John Ward (1629-1681), vicar of Stratford-on-Avon from 1662 
to 1668, in a diary and memorandum-book written between 166 1 
and 1663 (ed. Charles Severn, 1839) ; by the Rev. William Fulman, 
whose manuscripts are at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (with 
valuable interpolations made before 1708 by Archdeacon Richard 
Davies, vicar of Sapperton, Gloucestershire) ; by John Dowdall, 

1 Compiled between 1669 and 1696; first printed in Letters from the Bodleian Library, 
1813, and admirably re-edited for the Clarendon Press in 1898 by the Rev. Andrew 
Clark (2 vols.). 

2 See art. ' Shakespeare in Oral Tradition ' in the present writer s Shakespeare and 
the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 49 seq. 

2T 641 



642 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

who recorded his experiences of travel through Warwickshire in 
1693 (London, 1838) ; and by William Hall, who described a visit 
to Stratford in 1694 (London, 1884, from Hall's letter among the 
Bodleian MSS.)- Phillips in his 'Theatrum Poetarum' (1675), 
and Langbaine in his 'English Dramatick Poets' (1691), confined 
themselves to elementary criticism. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe 
prefixed to his edition of the plays a more ambitious memoir than 
had yet been attempted, and embodied some hitherto unrecorded 
Stratford and London traditions with which the actor Thomas 
Better ton (163 5-1 7 10) supplied him. A little fresh gossip was 
collected by William Oldys, and was printed from his manuscript 
'Adversaria' (now in the British Museum) as an appendix to 
Yeowell's 'Memoir of Oldys,' 1862. Pope, Johnson, and Steevens, 
in the biographical prefaces to their editions, mainly repeated the 
narratives of their predecessor, Rowe. 

In the Prolegomena to the Variorum editions of 1803, 18 13, 
and especially in that of 182 1, there was embodied a mass of fresh 
^. , information derived by Edmund Malone from sys- 
of the tematic researches among the parochial records of 

centu^'^*^'^ Stratford, the manuscripts accumulated by the actor 
AUeyn at Dulwich, and official papers of state preserved 
in the public offices in London (now collected in the Public Record 
Office). The available knowledge of Elizabethan stage history, 
as well as of Shakespeare's biography, was thus greatly extended, 
and Malone's information in spite of subsequent discoveries re- 
mains of supreme value. John Payne CoUier, in his 'Historj'- of 
English Dramatic Poetry' (183 1), in his 'New Facts '.about Shake- 
speare (1835), his 'New Particulars' (1836), and his 'Further Par- 
ticulars' (1839), and in his editions of Henslowe's 'Diary' and the 
'AUeyn Papers' for the Shakespeare Society, while occasionally 
throwing some further light on obscure places, foisted on Shake- 
speare's biography a series of ingeniously forged documents which 
have greatly perplexed succeeding biographers.^ Joseph Hunter 
in 'New Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1845) and George Russell 
French's ' Shakespeareana Genealogica' (1869) occasionally supple- 
mented Malone's researches. James Orchard HalliweU (after- 
wards HalliweU-PhiUipps 1820-1889) printed separately, between 
1850 and 1884, in various privately issued publications, ample 
selections from the Stratford archives and the extant legal docu- 
ments bearing on Shakespeare's career, many of them for the first 
time. In 1881 Halhwell-Phillipps began the collective publication 
of materials for a fuU biography in his 'Outlines of the Life of 
Shakespeare ' ; this work was generously enlarged in successive 
editions untU it acquired massive proportions ; in the seventh 
edition of 1887, which embodied the author's final corrections and 

1 See pp. 647 seq. 



THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 643 

additions, it reached near 1000 pages. (Subsequent editions re- 
print the seventh edition without change.) Frederick Gard Fleay 
(1831-1909), in his 'Shakespeare Manual' (1876), in his 'Life of 
Shakespeare' (1886), in his 'History of the Stage' (1890), and his 
'Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama' (1891), adds much 
useful information respecting stage history and Shakespeare's 
relations with his fellow-dramatists, mainly derived from a study 
of the original editions of the plays of Shakespeare and of his 
contemporaries; but many of Mr. Fleay's statements and con- 
jectures are unauthenticated. Dr. C. W. Wallace, of Nebraska, 
has since 1904 added some subsidiary biographical details of 
much interest from documents at the PubHc Record Office which 
he has examined for the first time.^ 

The history of Stratford-on-Avon and Shakespeare's relations 
with the town are treated in Wheler's 'History and Antiquities' 
(1806), and his 'Birthplace of Shakespeare' (1824) ; in stratford 
John R. Wise's 'Shakespeare, his Birthplace and its topog- 
Neighbourhood ' (186 1) ; in the present writer's 'Strat- ^^P^y- 
ford-on-Avon to the Death of Shakespeare' (new edit. 1907) ; in J. 
Harvey Bloom's 'Shakespeare's Church' (1902) ; in C. I. Elton's 
'William Shakespeare : his Family and Friends' (1904) ; in J. W. 
Gray's 'Shakespeare's Marriage' (1905), and in Mrs. Stopes's 
'Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries' (new edit. 1907), 
and her 'Shakespeare's Environment' (1914). Wise appends a 
' glossary of words still used in Warwickshire to be found in Shak- 
spere.' The parish registers of Stratford have been edited by Mr. 
Richard Savage for the Parish Registers Society (1898-9). Har- 
rison's 'Description of England' and Stubbes's 'Anatomy of 
Abuses' (both reprinted by the New Shakspere Society) supply 
contemporary accounts of the social conditions prevailing in 
Shakespeare's time. Later compilations on the subject are 
Nathan Drake's 'Shakespeare and his Times' (1817) and G. W. 
Thornbury's Shakspere's England' (1856). 

The chief monographs on special points in Shakespeare's bio- 
graphy are Dr. Richard Farmer's 'Essay on the Learning of 
Shakespeare' (1767), reprinted in the Variorum specialised 
editions; Octavius Gilchrist's 'Examination of the studies jn 
Charges ... of Ben Jonson's Enmity towards Shake- biography, 
speare' (1808) ; W. J. Thoms's 'Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?' 

1 Recent researches by Dr. Wallace and others on the history of the theatres are 
already catalogued in this volume in the notes to chapters V. ('Shakespeare and the 
Actors'); VI. ('On the London Stage'); XVI. ('Shakespeare's Financial Resources'); 
see especially pp. 310-1, note. An epitome of the biographical information to date is 
supplied in Karl Elze's Life of Shakespeare (Halle, 1876; English translation, 188S), 
with which Elze's Essays from the publications of the German Shakespeare Society 
(English translation, 1S74) are worth studying. Samuel Neil's Shakespeare, a critical 
Biography (.1861), Edward Dowden's Shakespere Primer (1877) and Introduction to Shak- 
spere (1893), and F. J. Furnivall's Introduction to the Leopold Shakspere, reissued as Shake- 
speare: Life and Work (igoS), are useful. 



644 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

(1849), a study based on an erroneous identification of the poet 
with another WilHam Shakespeare ; John Charles Bucknill's 
'Medical Knowledge of j Shakespeare ' (i860); C. F. Green's 
'Shakespeare's Crab-Tree, with its Legend' (1862) ; C. H. Brace- 
bridge's 'Shakespeare no Deer-stealer ' (1862) ; H. N. Ellacombe's 
'Plant Lore of Shakespeare' (1878) ; William Blades's 'Shakspere 
and Typography' (1872) ; J. E. Harting's 'Ornithology of Shake- 
speare' (187 1) ; D. H. Madden's ' Diary of Master William Silence 
(Shakespeare and Sport),' new edit. 1907 ; and H. T. Stephenson's 
'Shakespeare's London' (1910). Shakespeare's knowledge of law 
has been the theme of many volumes, among which may be men- 
tioned W. L. Rushton's four volumes — 'Shakespeare a Lawyer' 
(1858), 'Shakespeare's Legal Maxims' (1859, new edit. 1907), 
'Shakespeare's Testamentary Language' (1869) and 'Shakespeare 
illustrated by the Lex Scripta' (1870) ; Lord Campbell's 'Shake- 
speare's Legal Acquirements' (1859) ; C. K. Davis's 'The Law in 
Shakespeare' (St. Paul, U.S.A., 1884) and E. J. White's 'Com- 
mentaries on the Law in Shakespeare' (St. Louis, 191 1). Specula- 
tions on Shakespeare's religion may be found in T. Carter's ' Shake- 
speare, Puritan and Recusant' (1897) and in H. S. Bowden's 
'The Religion of Shakespeare' (1899), which attempts to prove 
Shakespeare a Catholic. Shakespeare's knowledge of music is also 
the theme of many volumes : see E. M. Naylor's 'Shakespeare and 
Music' (1896), and 'Shakespeare Music' (1912) ; L. C. Elson's 
'Shakespeare in Music' (6th ed. 1908); and G. H. Cowling's 
'Music on the Shakespearian Stage' (1913). 

Francis Douce's 'Illustrations of Shakespeare' (1807, new 
edit. 1839), 'Shakespeare's Library' (ed. J. P. Collier and W. C. 
Aids to Hazlitt, 1875), 'Shakespeare's Plutarch' (ed. Skeat, 

study of 1 87 5) and ed. Tucker-Brooke, 1909), and 'Shake- 
gojsand speare's Hohnshed' (ed. W. G. Boswell-Stone, 1896) 
are, with H. R. D. Anders's 'Shakespeare's Books' 
(Berlin, 1904), of service in tracing the sources of Shakespeare's 
plots. M. W. MacCaUum's ' Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their 
Background' (1910) is a very complete monograph. The sources 
of the plots are presented methodically in Messrs. Chatto and 
Win^us's series of 'Shakespeare Classics' of which ten volumes 
have appeared. Alexander Schmidt's 'Shakespeare Lexicon' 
(1874, 3rd edit. 1902), Dr. E. A. Abbott's 'Shakespearian Gram- 
mar' (1869, new edit. 1893), and Prof. W. Franz's ' Shakespeare- 
Grammatik,' 2 pts. (HaUe, 1898-1900, 2nd ed. 1902), with his 
'Die Grundziige der Sprache Shakespeares ' (Berlin, 1902), and 
'Orthographie, Lautgebung und Wortbildung in den Werken Shake- 
Concor- speares' (Heidelberg, 1905), and Wilhelm Vietor's 

dances. ' Shakespeare's Pronunciation ' (2 vols., Marburg, 906), 

are valuable aids too a philological study of the text. Useful con- 



THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 645 

cordances to the Plays have been prepared by Mrs. Cowden-Clarke 
(1845; revised ed. 1864), to the Poems by Mrs. H. H. Furness 
(Philadelphia, 1875), and to Plays and Poems in one volume, with 
references to numbered lines, by John Bartlett (London and New 
York, 1895).^ With these works may be classed the briefer com- 
pilations, R. J. Cunliffe's 'A new Shakespearean Dictionary' 
(1910) and C. T. Onions's 'Shakespeare Glossary' (191 1). Ex- 
tensive bibliographies are given in Lowndes's 'Library Manual' 
(ed. Bohn) ; in Franz Thimm's Shakespeariana ' (1864 Bibliog- 
and 187 1) ; in 'British Museum Catalogue' (the Shake- raphies. 
spearean entries — 3680 titles — separately published in 1897) ; 
in the ' Encyclopccdia Britannica,' nth edit, (skilfully classified by 
Mr. H. R. Tedder) ; and in Mr. William Jaggard's ' Shakespeare 
Bibliography,' Stratford-on-Avon, 191 1. The Oxford University 
Press's facsimile reproductions of the First Folio (1902), and of 
Shakespeare's 'Poems' and 'Pericles' (1905), together with 'Four 
Quarto Editions of Plays of Shakespeare. The Property of the 
Trustees of Shakespeare's Birthplace. With five illustrations in 
facsimile.' (Stratford-on-Avon. Printed for the Trustees, 1908) 
contain much bibliographical information collected by the present 
writer. Mr. A. W. Pollard's 'Shakespeare Folios and Quartos' 
(1909) is the most comprehensive treatise on its subject which has 
yet been published. 

The valuable publications of the Shakespeare Society, the 
New Shakspere Society, and of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesell- 
schaft, are noticed above (see pp. 600, 618). To the critical 
critical studies by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dowden, and studies. 
Swinburne, on which comment has been made (see p. 599), there 
may be added the essays on Shakespeare's heroines respectively 
by Mrs. Jameson in 1833 and Lady Martin in 1885 ; Sir A. W. 
Ward's 'English Dramatic Literature' (1875, new edit, if 
Richard G. Moulton's 'Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist' (if 
'Shakespeare Studies' by Thomas Spencer Baynes (1893) ; F. S. 
Boas's ' Shakspere and his Predecessors' (1895); Georg Brandes's 
'William Shakespeare' — a somewhat fanciful study (Lon- 
don, 1898, 2 vols. 8vo) ; W.J. Courthope's 'History of English 
Poetry,' 1903, vol. iv. ; A. C. Bradley's 'Shakespearean Tragedy' 
(London, 1904), and his 'Oxford Lectures in Poetry' (1909) ; the 
present writer's 'Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century' 
(1904), and his 'Shakespeare and the Modern Stage' (1906); 
J. C. Collins's ' Studies in Shakespeare ' (1904) ; Sir Walter Raleigh's 
'Shakespeare' in 'English Men of Letters' series (1907); G. P. 
Baker's 'The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist' (1907) ; 

^ The earliest attempts at a concordance were A Complete Verbal Index to the Plays, 
by F. Twiss (1805), and An Index to the Remarkable Passages and Words, by Samuel 
Ayscough (1827), but these are now superseded. 



646 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Felix E. Schelling's 'Elizabethan Drama 1558-1642' (1908) 2 
vols.; and Brander Matthews's 'Shakespeare as a Playwright' 

(1913)-. 

The intense interest which Shakespeare's life and work have 
long universally excited has tempted unprincipled or sportively 
Shake- mischievous writers from time to time to deceive the 

spearean public by the forgery of documents purporting to 
forgenes. supply new information. George Steevens made some 
foolish excursions in this direction, and his example seems to have 
stimulated the notable activity of forgers which persisted from 
1780 to 1850. The frauds have caused students so much per- 
plexity that it may be useful to warn them against those Shake- 
spearean forgeries which have obtained the widest currency. In 
the 'Theatrical Review,' 1763 (No. 2), there was inserted in an 
George anonymous biography of Edward AUeyn (from the pen 

Steevens's q{ George Steevens) a letter purporting to be signed 
fabrication, ' G. Peel' and to have been addressed to Marlowe 
1763- _ ('Friend Marie'). The writer pretends to describe his 
meeting at the 'Globe' with Edward AUeyn and Shakespeare, 
when AUeyn taunted the dramatist with having borrowed from his 
own conversation the 'speech about the qualityes of an actor's 
exceUencye, in Hamlet his tragedye.' This clumsy fabrication 
was reproduced unquestioningly in the 'Annual Register' (1770), 
in Berkenhout's 'Biographia Literaria' (1777), in the 'Gentle- 
man's Magazine' (1801), in the 'British Critic' (1818, p. 422), in 
Charles Severn's introduction to John Ward's 'Diary' (1839, p. 81), 
in the 'Academy' (London, 18 Jan. 1902), in 'Poet Lore' (Boston, 
April 1902), and elsewhere. Alexander Dyce in his first edition of 
George Peek's 'Works' (1829, ist ed. vol. i. p. iii) reprinted it 
with a very slender reservation; Dyce's example was foUowed in 
WUliam Young's 'History of Dulwich CoUege' (1889, ii. 41-2). 
The fraud was justly denounced without much effect by Isaac 
Disraeli in his ' Curiosities of Literature' (1823) and more recently 
by the present writer in an article entitled ' A PerU of Shakespearean 
Research.' ^ The futUe forgery still continues to mislead unwary 
inquirers who unearth it in early periodicals. 

Much notoriety was obtained by John Jordan (i 746-1809), a 
resident at Stratford-on-Avon, whose most important achievement 
John Jordan, was the forgery of the will of Shakespeare's father; 
1746-1809- but many other papers in Jordan's 'Original CoUec- 
tions on Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon' (1780), and 'Original 
Memoirs and Historical Accounts of the Families of Shakespeare 
and Hart,' are open to the gravest suspicion.^ 

1 Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, 1906, pp. 188-197. 

2 Jordan's Collections, including this fraudulent will of Shakespeare's father, was printed 
privately by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1864. 



THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 647 

The best known Shakespearean forger of the eighteenth century 
was WiUiam Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a barrister's clerk, who, 
with the aid of his father, Samuel Ireland (1740?- xhe Ireland 
1800), an author and engraver of some repute, produced forgeries, 
in 1796 a volume of forged papers claiming to relate '''^^• 
to Shakespeare's career. The title ran : ' Miscellaneous Papers 
and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shake- 
speare, including the tragedy of "King Lear" and a small frag- 
ment of "Hamlet" from the original MSS. in the possession of 
Samuel Ireland.' On April 2, 1796, Sheridan and Kemble pro- 
duced at Drury Lane Theatre a bombastic tragedy in blank verse 
entitled 'Vortigern' under the pretence that it was by Shake- 
speare, and that it had been recently found among the manuscripts 
of the dramatist which had fallen into the hands of the Irelands. 
The piece, which was published, was the invention of young 
Ireland. The fraud of the Irelands for some time deceived a 
section of the literary public, but it was finally exposed by Malone 
in his valuable ' Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland MSS ' 
(1796). Young Ireland afterwards published his 'Confessions' 
(1805). He had acquired much skiU in copying Shakespeare's 
genuine signature from the facsimile in Steevens's edition of Shake- 
speare's works of the mortgage-deed of the Blackfriars house of 
1612-13.^ He conformed to that style of handwriting in his 
forged deeds and literary compositions.^ He also inserted copies 
of the dramatist's signature on the title-pages of many sixteenth- 
century books, and often added notes in the same feigned hand on 
their margins. Numerous sixteenth-century volumes embellished 
by Ireland in this manner are extant in the British Museum and 
in private collections. Ireland's forged signatures and marginalia 
have been frequently mistaken for genuine autographs of Shake- 
speare. 

But Steevens's, Ireland's and Jordan's frauds are clumsy com- 
pared with those that belong to the nineteenth century. Most 
of the works relating to the biography of Shakespeare Forgeries 
or the history of the Elizabethan stage produced by promulgated 
John Payne Collier, or under his supervision, between and others, 
1835 and 1849 are honeycombed with forged references 1835-1849. 
to Shakespeare, and many of the forgeries have been admitted 
unsuspectingly into literary history. The chief of these forged 
papers I arrange below in the order of the dates that have been 
allotted to them by their manufacturers.^ 

1 See pp. 456-7- 

2 See a full description of a large private collection of Ireland forgeries in the sale 
catalogue of John Eliot Hodgkin's library dispersed at Sotheby's May 19, 1914. 

3 Reference has already been made to the character of the manuscript corrections 
made by Collier in a copy of the Second Folio of 1632, known as the Perkins Folio. See 
p. 568, note I. The chief authorities on the subject of the Collier forgeries are: An 



648 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

1589 (November). Appeal from the Blackfriars players (16 in 
number) to the Privy Council for favour. Shakespeare's 
name stands twelfth. From the manuscripts at Bridge- 
water House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. First 
printed in Collier's ' New Facts regarding the Life of 
Shakespeare,' 1835. 

1596 (July). List of inhabitants of the Liberty of Southwark, 
Shakespeare's name appearing in the sixth place. First 
printed in Collier's 'Life of Shakespeare,' 1858, p. 126. 

1596. Petition of the owners and players of the Blackfriars 
Theatre to the Privy Council in reply to an alleged petition 
of the inhabitants requesting the closing of the play- 
house. Shakespeare's name is fifth on the list of petitioners. 
This forged paper is in the Public Record Office, and was 
first printed in Collier's 'History of English Dramatic 
Poetry' (1831), vol. i. p. 297, and has been constantly 
reprinted as if it were genuine.^ 

1596 (circa). A letter signed H. S. (i.e. Henry, Earl of South- 
ampton), addressed to Sir Thomas Egerton, praying 
protection for the players of the Blackfriars Theatre, 
and mentioning Burbage and Shakespeare by name. 
First printed in Collier's 'New Facts.' 

1596 (circa). A list of sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre with 
the valuation of their property, in which Shakespeare 
is credited with four shares, worth 933/. 6^. 8^. This was 
first printed in Collier's 'New Facts,' 1835, p. 6, from the 
Egerton MSS. at Bridgewater House. 

1602 (August 6). Notice of the performance of 'Othello' by 
Burbages 'players' before Queen Elizabeth when on 
a visit to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord-keeper, at Hare- 
field, in a forged account of disbursements by Egerton's 
steward, Arthur Mainwaringe, from the manuscripts at 
Bridgewater House, belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere. 
Printed in Collier's 'New Particulars regarding the Works 
of Shakespeare,' 1836, and again in CoUier's edition of the 
'Egerton Papers,' 1840 (Camden Society), pp. 342-3. 

1603 (October 3). Mention of 'Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe' 
in a letter at Dulwich from Mrs. AUeyn to her husband; 

Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier's An- 
notated Shakspere Folio, 1632, and of certain Shaksperian Documents likewise published by Mr. 
Collier, by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London, i860; A Complete View of the Shakespeare Con- 
troversy concerning the Authenticity and Genuineness of Manuscript Matter a_ffecting the 
Works and Biography of Shakspere, published by J. Payne Collier as the Fruits of his Re- 
searches, by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, London, 1861 ; Catalogue 
of the Manuscripts and Muniments of AUeyn' s College of God's Gift at Dulwich, by George 
F. Warner, M.A., 1881 ; Notes on the Life of John Payne Collier, with a Complete List of 
his Works and an Account of such Shakespeare Documents as are believed to be spurious, by 
Henry B. Wheatley, London, 1884. 

1 See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, i59S-7> P- 3io- 



THE SOURCES OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 649 

part of the letter is genuine. First published in Collier's 
'Memoirs of Edward AUeyn,' 1841, p. 63.^ 

1604 (April 9) . List of the names of eleven players of the King's 
Company fraudulently appended to a genuine letter at 
Dulwich College from the Privy Council bidding the Lord 
Mayor permit performances by the King's players. 
Printed in Collier's 'Memoirs of Edward AUeyn,' 1841, 
p. 68.2 

1607. Notes of performances of 'Hamlet' and 'Richard II' 
by the crews of the vessels of the East India Company's 
fleet off Sierra Leone. First printed in 'Narratives of 
Voyages towards the North-West, 1496-1631,' edited by 
Thomas Rundall for the Hakluyt Society, 1849, P- 231, 
from what purported to be an exact transcript 'in the 
India Office' of the ' Journal of William Keehng,' captain 
of one of the vessels in the expedition. Keeling's manu- 
script journal is still at the India Office, but the leaves 
that should contain these entries are now, and have long 
been, missing from it. 

1609 (January 4). A warrant appointing Robert Daborne, 
William Shakespeare, and other instructors of the Children 
of the Revels. From the Bridgewater House MSS. First 
printed in Collier's 'New Facts,' 1835. 

1609 (April 6). List of persons assessed for poor rate in South- 
wark, April 6, 1609, in which Shakespeare's name appears. 
First printed in CoUier's 'Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' 
1841, p. 91. The forged paper is at Dulwich.^ 

The entries in the Master of the Revels Account books noting 
court performances of the ' Moor of Venice ' (or ' OtheUo ') on Nov- 
ember I, 1604, of 'Measure for Measure' on December p^lsely 
26, 1604, of 'The Tempest' on November i, 1611, suspected 
and of 'The Winter's Tale' on November 5, 161 1, were documents, 
for a time suspected of forgery. These entries were first printed 
by Peter Cunningham, a friend of Collier, in the volume 'Extracts 
from the Accounts of the Revels at Court ' published by the Shake- 
speare Society in 1842. The originals were at the time in Cunning- 
ham's possession, but were restored to the Public Record Office in 
1868 when they were suspected of forgery. The authenticity of the 
documents was completely vindicated by Mr. Ernest Law in his 
'Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries' (1911) and 'More about 
Shakespeare "Forgeries'" (19 13). Mr. Law's conclusions were 
supported by Sir George Warner, Sir H. Maxwell Lyte, Dr. C. W. 

1 See Warner's Catalogue of Dulwich MSS. pp. 24-6. 
. '■' Cf. ibid. pp. 26-7. 
' See ibid. pp. 30-31. 



6so 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Wallace and Sir James Dobbie, F.R.S., Government Analyst, 
who analysed the ink of the suspected handwriting.^ 

1 The Revels' Accounts were originally among the papers of the Audit Office at Somer- 
set House, where Mr. Cunningham was employed as a clerk, from 1834 to 1858. In 1859 
the Audit Office papers were transferred from Somerset House to the Public Record Office. 
But the suspected account books for 1604-5 and certain accounts for 1636-7 were retained 
in Cunningham's possession. In 1868 he offered to sell the two earlier books to the British 
Museum, and the later papers to a bookseller. All were thereupon claimed by the Public 
Record Office, and were placed in that repository with the rest of the Audit Office archives. 
Cunningham's reputation was not rated high. The documents were submitted to no care- 
ful scrutiny; Mr. E. A. Bond, Keeper of the MSS. in the British Museum, expressed 
doubt of the genuineness of the Booke of 1604-5, mainly owing to the spelling of Shake- 
speare's name as ' Shaxberd' ; the Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, Sir Thomas 
Duffus Hardy, inclined to the same view. Shakespearean critics, who on assthetic grounds 
deemed 1604 to be too early a date to which to ascribe Othello, were disinclined to recognise 
the Revels Account as genuine. On the other hand Malone had access to the Audit 
Office archives at the end of the eighteenth century, and various transcripts dating be- 
tween 1571 and 1588 are printed in the Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, iii. 360-409. An 
extract from them for the year 1604-5 is preserved among the Malone papers at the 
Bodleian Library (Malone 29). This memorandum agrees at all points with Cunning- 
ham's 'Revells Booke' of 1604-5. Moreover Malone positively assigned the date 1611 
to The Tempest in 1809 on information which he did not specify (Variorum Shakespeare, 
XV. 423), but which corresponds with the suspected 'Revells Booke' of the same year._ A 
series of papers in the Athenceum for 1911 and 1912 (signed 'Audi alteram partem') vainly 
attempted to question Mr. Law's vindication of the documents. 



II 

THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY 

The accepted version of Shakespeare's biography rests securely on 
documentary evidence and on a continuous stream of oral tradition, 
which went wholly unquestioned for more than three perversity 
centuries, and has not been seriously impugned since, of the 
Yet the apparent contrast between the homeliness of controversy. 
Shakespeare's Stratford career and the breadth of observation and 
knowledge displayed in his literary work has evoked the fantastic 
theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the Hterature that 
passes under his name. Perverse attempts have been made either 
to pronounce the authorship of his works an open question or to 
assign them to his contemporary, Francis Bacon (i 561-1626), the 
great prose-writer, philosopher and lawyer.^ 

All the argument bears witness to a phase of that more or less 
morbid process of scepticism, which was authoritatively analysed 
by Archbishop Whately in his 'Historic Doubts relative to Na- 
poleon Bonaparte' (18 19). The Archbishop there showed how 
' obstinate habits of doubt, divorced from full knowledge or parted 
from the power of testing evidence, can speciously challenge any 
narrative, however circumstantial, however steadily maintained, 
however public and however important the events it narrates, 
however grave the authority on which it is based.' 

Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, d. 1855), in his 
'Romance of Yachting' (1848), first raised doubts of Shakespeare's 
authorship. There followed in a like temper 'Who chief 
wrote Shakespeare?' in 'Chambers's Journal,' August exponents. 
7, 1852, and an article by Miss Delia Bacon, in 'Putnams' 
Monthly,' January 1856. On the latter was based 'The Philosophy 
of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Deha Bacon,' with a 
neutral preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne, London and Boston, 
1857. Miss Delia Bacon, who was the first to spread abroad a 
spirit of scepticism respecting the established facts of Shakespeare's 
career, died insane on September 2, 1859.^ Mr. William Henry 

1 Equally ludicrous endeavours have been made to transfer Shakespeare's responsi- 
bility to the shoulders of other contemporaries besides Bacon. Karl Bleibtreu's Der 
■wahrc Shakespeare (Munich 1907), and C. Demblon's Lord Rutland est Shakespeare (Paris 
1913), are fantastic attempts to identify Shakespeare with Francis Manners sixth Earl of 
Rutland; see p. 453 iw^ra. 

2 Cf. Life by Theodore Bacon, London, 1888. 

651 



652 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Smith, a resident in London, seems first to have suggested the 
Baconian hypothesis in 'Was Lord Bacon the author of Shake- 
speare's plays? — a letter to Lord EUesmere' (1856), which was 
republished as 'Bacon and Shakespeare' (1857). The chief early 
exponent of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an Amer- 
ican lawyer, who published at New York in 1866 'The Authorship 
of the Plays attributed to Shakespeare,' a monument of misapplied 
ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2 vols.). Bacon's 'Promus of Formu- 
laries and Elegancies,' a commonplace book in Bacon's hand- 
writing in the British Museum (London, 1883), was first edited 
by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian 
theory; it contained many words and phrases common to the 
works of Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the 
argument from parallelisms of expression to its extremest limits. 
Mr. Edwin Reed's 'Bacon and Shakespeare' (2 vols., Boston, 
1902), continued the wasteful labours of Holmes and Mrs. Pott. 
Its vogue The Baconian theory, which long found its main accept- 
in America, a^ce in America, achieved its wildest manifestation in 
the book called 'The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cypher 
in the so-caUed Shakespeare Plays' (Chicago and London, 1887, 
2 vols.), which was the work of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly of Hastings, 
Minnesota. The author professed to apply to the First Folio text 
a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters at certain 
intervals forming words and sentences which stated that Bacon 
was author not merely of Shakespeare's plays, but also of Mar- 
lowe's work, Montaigne's 'Essays,' and Burton's 'Anatomy of 
Melancholy.' Many refutations were published of Mr. Donnelly's 
arbitrary and baseless contention. Another bold effort to discover 
in the First Folio a cypher-message in the Baconian interest was 
made by Mrs. GaUup, of Detroit, in 'The Bi-Literal Cypher of 
Francis Bacon' (1900). The absurdity of this endeavour was 
demonstrated in numerous letters and articles published in The 
Times newspaper (December 1901-January 1902). The Baconians 
subsequently found an English champion in Sir Edwin Durning 
Lawrence (1837-1914) who pressed into his service every manner 
of misapprehension in his 'Bacon is Shakespeare' (1900), of a 
penny abridgment of which he claimed to have circulated 300,000 
copies during 19 12. Sir Edwin, like Donnelly, freakishly credited 
Bacon with the composition not only of Shakespeare's works but 
of almost all the great literature of his time.^ 

^ A Bacon Society was founded in London in 1885 to develope and promulgate the 
unintelligible theory, and it inaugurated a magazine (named since May 1893 Baconiana). 
A quarterly periodical also called Baconiana, and issued in the same interest, was estab- 
lished at Chicago in 1892. The Bibliography of the Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy by 
W. H. Wyman, Cincinnati, 1884, gives the titles of 255 books or pamphlets on both 
sides of the subject, published since 1848; the list was continued during 1886 in Shake- 
speariana, a monthly journal published at Philadelphia, and might now be extended to 
fully thrice its original number. 



THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY 653 

The argument from the alleged cypher is unworthy of sane con- 
sideration. Otherwise the Baconians presume in Shakespeare's 
plays a general omniscience (especially a knowledge of law) of 
which no contemporary except Bacon is alleged to show command. 
At any rate such accomplishment is held by the Baconians to be 
incredible in one enjoying Shakespeare's limited opportunities 
of education. They insist that there are many close parallelisms 
between passages in Shakespeare's and in Bacon's works, and that 
Bacon makes enigmatic references in his correspondence to secret 
' recreations ' and ' alphabets ' and concealed poems for which his 
alleged employment as a concealed dramatist can alone account. 
No substance attached to any of these pleas. There is a far closer 
and more constant resemblance between Shakespeare's vocabulary 
and that of other contemporaries than between his and Bacon's 
language, and the similarities merely testify to the general usage 
of the day.^ Again Shakespeare's frequent employment of legal 
terminology conforms to a literary fashion of the day, and was 
practised on quite as liberal a scale and with far greater accuracy 
by Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and many other eminent writers 
who enjoyed no kind of legal training and were never engaged in 
legal work. (See pp. 43-4 supra.) The allegation that Bacon 
was the author of works which he hesitated to claim in gj^. r^^^^^jg 
his lifetime has no just bearing on the issue. The Ba- Matthew's 
conians' case commonly rests on an arbitrary misinter- '^"er. 
pretation of the evidence on this subject. Sir Tobie Matthew 

1 Most of the parallels that are commonly quoted by Baconians are phrases in ordinary 
use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument 
from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon 
and Shakespeare both make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. 
Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study 
of political philosophy. Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), wrote: 'Is not 
the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not 
fit auditors of moral philosophy?' (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Kitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, 
in Troilus and Cressida, n. ii. 166, wrote of 'young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to 
hear 7noral philosophy.' But the alleged error of substituting moral for political philosophy 
in Aristotle's text is more apparent than real. By 'political' philosophy Aristotle, as his 
context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable 
from what is commonly called 'morals.' In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle's Ethics 
which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage 
to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift 
is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who 
are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle's language 
is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle 
at the close of his popular Colloquia (Florence, 1531, sig. Q q), wrote of his endeavour to 
insinuate serious precepts ' into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described 
as unfit auditors of moral philosophy' ('in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit 
Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethics philosophia;'). In the Latin play, Pedantius 
(1581 ?), a philosopher tells his pupil, "Tu non es idoneus auditor moralis philosophiae ' 
(1. 327). In a French translation of the Ethics by the Comte de Plessis (Paris, 1553), 
the passage is rendered 'parquoy le ieune enfant n'est suffisant auditeur de la science 
civile'; and an English commentator (in a manuscript note written about 1605 in a copy 
in the British Museum) Englished the sentence: 'Whether a young man may be a fitte 
scholler of morall philosophic.' In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his 
preface to his Discorsi sopra Cornelia Tacito, has the remark, ' E non e discordante da questa 
mia opinione Aristotele, il qual dice, che i giovani non sono buoni ascultatori delle morali' 
(cf. Spedding, Works of Bacon, i. 739, iii. 440). 



654 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

wrote to Bacon (as Viscount St. Albans) at an uncertain date after 
January 162 1 : 'The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my 
nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though 
he be known by another.' ^ This unpretending sentence is dis- 
torted into conclusive evidence that Bacon composed works of 
commanding excellence under another's name, and among them 
probably Shakespeare's plays. According to the only sane in- 
terpretation of Matthew's words, his 'most prodigious wit' was 
some Englishman named Bacon whom he met abroad. There 
is little doubt that Matthew referred to his friend Father Thomas 
Southwell, a learned Jesuit domiciled chiefly in the Low Countries, 
whose real surname was Bacon. (He was born in 1592 at Scul- 
thorpe, near Walsingham, Norfolk, being son of Thomas Bacon of 
that place; he died at Watten in 1637.)^ 

Such authentic examples of Bacon's effort to write verse as 
survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great 
as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of 
penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare. His 'Trans- 
lation of Certaine Psalmes into English Verse' (1625) convicts 
him of inability to rise above the level of clumsy doggerel. 

Recent English sceptics have fought shy of the manifest absur- 
dities of the Baconian heresy and have concentrated their effort 
The legal On the negative argument that the positive knowledge 
sceptics. Qf Shakespeare's career is too slight to warrant the 
accepted tradition. These writers hav.e for the most part been 
lawyers who lack the required literary training to give their work 
on the subject any genuine authority. Many of them after the 
manner of ex-parte advocates rest a part of their case on minor 
discrepancies among orthodox critics and biographers. Like the 
Baconians, they exaggerate or misrepresent the extent of Shake- 
speare's classical and legal attainments. They fail to perceive 
that the curriculum of Stratford Grammar School and the general 
cioltivation of the epoch, combined with Shakespeare's rare faculty 
of mental assimilation, leave no part of his acquired knowledge 
unaccounted for. They ignore the cognate development of poetic 
and intellectual power which is convincingly illustrated by the 
careers of many contemporaries and friends of Shakespeare, 
notably by that of the actor-dramatist Thomas Heywood. To 
crown aU, they make no just allowance for the mysterious origin 

1 Cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that 
Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon's brother Anthony, who died in 1601 ; Matthew 
was writing of a man who was alive more than twenty years later. 

2 It was with reference to a book published by this man that Sir Henry Wotton wrote, 
in language somewhat resembling Sir Tobie Matthew's, to Sir Edmund Bacon, half- 
brother to the great Francis Bacon, on December 5, 1638: 'The Book of Controversies 
issued under the narne of F. Baconus hath this addition to the said name, alias Southwell, 
as those of that Society shift their names as often as their shirts' (Reliquim WoUoniance, 
1672, p. 47S). 



THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CONTROVERSY 655 

and miraculous processes of all poetic genius — features which 
are signally exemplified in the case of Chatterton, Burns, Keats 
and other poets of humbler status and fortune than Shakespeare. 
The most plausible manifestoes from the pens of the legal sceptics 
are Judge Webb's 'The Mystery of WiUiam Shakespeare,' Mr. 
G. C. Bompas's 'The Problem of the Shakespeare Plays,' Lord 
Penzance's 'The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy,' all of which 
were published in 1902. A more pretentious effort on the same 
lines was Mr. G. G. Greenwood's 'The Shakespeare Problem 
Restated' (1908), which the author supplemented with 'In re 
Shakespeare: Beeching v. Greenwood. Rejoinder' (1909) and 
'The Vindicators of Shakespeare: A reply to Critics' (191 1). 
Perhaps the chief interest attaching to Mr. Greenwood's per- 
formance was the adoption of his point of view by the American 
humourist Mark Twain, who in his latest book 'Is Shakespeare 
dead?' (1909) attacked the accredited belief. Mark Twain's 
intervention in what he called 'the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle' 
proved as might be expected that his idiosyncrasies unfitted him 
for treating seriously matters of literary history or criticism. A 
wholesome corrective in a small compass to the whole attitude of 
doubt may be found in Mr. Charles Allen's 'Notes on the Bacon- 
Shakespeare Question' (Boston, 1900), and many later vindications 
of the orthodox faith are worthy of notice. Judge Willis in 'The 
Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy' (1903) very carefully examined 
in legal form the documentary evidence and pronounced it to 
establish conclusively Shakespeare's position from a strictly legal 
point of view. Forcible replies to Mr. Greenwood's attack were 
issued by Dean Beeching in his 'William Shakespeare, Player, 
Playmaker, and Poet' (1908), and by Andrew Lang in his 'Shake- 
speare, Bacon and the Great Unknown' (1912). The most com- 
prehensive exposure of both the Baconian and sceptical delusions 
was made by Mr. J. M. Robertson, M.P., in 'The Baconian 
Heresy: A Confutation' (19 13). 



Ill 

THE YOUTHFUL CAREER OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 

From the dedicatory epistles addressed by Shakespeare to the 
Earl of Southampton in the opening pages of his two narrative 
South- poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and 'Lucrece' 

ampton and (1594)/ from the account given by Sir William D'Ave- 
Shake- nant, and recorded by Nicholas Rowe, of the earl's lib- 

eral bounty to the poet,^ and from the language of the 
'Sonnets,' it is abundantly clear that Shakespeare enjoyed very 
friendly relations with Southampton from the time when the 
dramatist's genius was nearing its maturity. No contemporary 
document or tradition suggests that Shakespeare was the friend or 
protege of any man of rank other than Southampton; and the 
student of Shakespeare's biography has reason to ask for some 
information respecting him who enjoyed the exclusive distinction 
of serving Shakespeare as his patron. 

Southampton was a patron worth cultivating. Both his parents 
came of the New Nobility, and enjoyed vast wealth. His father's 
P re ta father was Lord Chancellor under Henry VHI, and 

when the monasteries were dissolved, although he was 
faithful to the old religion, he was granted rich estates in Hamp- 
shire, including the abbeys of Titchfield and Beaulieu in the New 
Forest. He was created Earl of Southampton early in Edward 
VI's reign, and, dying shortly afterwards, was succeeded by his 
only son, the father of Shakespeare's friend. The second earl 
loved magnificence in his household. 'He was highly reverenced 
and favoured of all that were of his own rank, and bravely at- 
tended and served by the best gentlemen of those counties wherein 
he lived. His muster-roll never consisted of four lacqueys and a 
coachman, but of a whole troop of at least a hundred well-mounted 
gentlemen and yeomen.'* The second earl remained a Catholic, 
like his, father, and a chivalrous avowal of sympathy with Mary 
Queen of Scots procured him a term of imprisonment in the year 
preceding his distinguished son's birth. At a youthful age he 
married a lady of fortune, Mary Browne, daughter of the first 
Viscount Montague, also a Catholic. Her portrait, now at 
Welbeck, was painted in her early married days, and shows regu- 

^ See pp. 142, 146. ^ See p. 197. 

8 Gervase Markham, Honour in his Perfection, 1624. 

656 



YOUTHFUL CAREER OF SOUTHAMPTON 657 

larly formed features beneath bright auburn hair. Two sons and 
a daughter were the issue of the union. Shalcespeare's friend, the 
second son, was born at her father's residence, Cowdray Birth on 
House, near Midhurst, on October 6, 1573. He was Oct. 6, 1573- 
thus Shakespeare's junior by nine years and a half. 'A goodly 
boy, God bless him!' exclaimed the gratified father, writing of 
his birth to a friend.^ But the father barely survived the boy's 
infancy. He died at the early age of thirty-five — two days 
before the child's eighth birthday. The elder son was already 
dead. Thus, on October 4, 1581, the second and only surviving 
son became third Earl of Southampton, and entered on his great 
inheritance.^ 

As was customary in the case of an infant peer, the little earl 
became a royal ward — 'a child of state' — and Lord Burghley, 
the Prime Minister, acted as the boy's guardian in the g^^cation. 
Queen's behalf. Burghley had good reason to be satis- 
fied with his ward's intellectual promise. 'He spent,' wrote a 
contemporary, 'his childhood and other younger terms in the 
study of good letters.' At the age of twelve, in the autumn of 
1585, he was admitted to St. John's CoUege, Cambridge, 'the 
sweetest nurse of knowledge in all the University.' Southampton 
breathed easily the cultured atmosphere. Next summer he sent 
his guardian, Burghley, an essay in Ciceronian Latin on the some- 
what cynical text that 'All men are moved to the pursuit of virtue 
by the hope of reward.' The argument, if unconvincing, is pre- 
cocious. 'Every man,' the boy tells us, 'no matter how well or 
how iU endowed with the graces of humanity, whether in the en- 
joyment of great honour or condemned to obscurity, experiences 
that yearning for glory which alone begets virtuous endeavour.' 
The paper, still preserved at Hatfield, is a model of caligraphy; 
every letter is shaped with delicate regularity, and betrays a re- 
finement most uncommon in boys of thirteen.^ Southampton re- 
mained at the University for some two years, graduating M.A. at 
sixteen in 1589. Throughout his after life he cherished for his 
college 'great love and affection.' 

Before leaving Cambridge Southampton entered his name at 
Gray's Inn. Some knowledge of law was deemed needful in one 
who was to control a landed property that was not only large 
already but likely to grow.^ Meanwhile he was sedulously culti- 

' Loseley MSS. ed. A.J. Kempe, p. 240. 

2 His mother, after thirteen years of widowhood, married in 1594 Sir Thomas Heneage, 
vice-chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth's household; but he died within a year, and in 
1596 she took a third husband, Sir William Hervey, who distinguished himself in military 
service in Ireland and was created a peer as Lord Hervey by James I. 

' By kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury I lately copied out this essay at 
Hatfield. 

^ In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel of War- 
dour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an addi- 

2U 



658 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

vating his literary tastes. He took into his 'pay and patronage' 
John Florio, the well-known author and Italian tutor, and was 
soon, according to Florio's testimony, as thoroughly versed in 
ItaUan as 'teaching or learning' could make him. 

'When he was young,' wrote a later admirer, 'no ornament of 
youth was wanting in him ' ; and it was naturally to the Court 
that his friends sent him at an early age to display his varied graces. 
He can hardly have been more than seventeen when he was pre- 
sented to his sovereign. She showed him kindly notice, and the 
Earl of Essex, her brUliant favourite, acknowledged his fascination. 
Thenceforth Essex displayed in his welfare a brotherly interest 
which proved in course of time a very doubtful blessing. 

While stiU a boy, Southampton entered with as much zest 
into the sports and dissipations of his fellow courtiers as into their 
Recognition literary and artistic pursuits. At tennis, in jousts 
°m^ton^' and tournaments, he achieved distinction; nor was 
youthful he a stranger to the delights of gambling at primero. 
beauty. jj^ 1592, when he was in his eighteenth year, he was 

recognised as the most handsome and accomplished of all the young 
lords who frequented the royal presence. In the autumn of that 
year Elizabeth paid Oxford a visit in state. Southampton was 
in the throng of noblemen who bore her company. In a Latin 
poem describing the brilliant ceremonial, which was published at 
the time at the University press, eulogy was lavished without 
stint on aU the Queen's attendants ; but the academic poet de- 
clared that Southampton's personal attractions exceeded those of 
any other in the royal train. 'No other youth who was present,' 
he wrote, 'was more beautiful than this prince of Hampshire {quo 
non formosior alter affuit), nor more distinguished in the arts of 
learning, although as yet tender down scarce bloomed on his cheek.' 
The last words testify to Southampton's boyish appearance.^ 
Next year it was rumoured that his ' external grace ' was to receive 
signal recognition by his admission, despite his juvenility, to the 
Order of the Garter. 'There be no Knights of the Garter new 
chosen as yet,' wrote a well-informed courtier on May 3, 1593, 
'but there were four nominated.' ^ Three were eminent public 

tional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his 'nonage,' 
Arundel wrote, the Earl was by no means 'of the smallest hope.' Arundel, with almost 
prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton's 'most feared 
rival' in the competition for the land in question. Arundel was referring to the father 
of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been described 
as Shakespeare's friend of the Sonnets (cf. Calendar of Hatfield MSS. iii. 365.) 

'■ Cf. Apollinis et Musarum Euktikct EiSuAAta Oxford, 1592, reprinted in Elizabethan 
Oxford (Oxford Historical Society), edited by Charles Plummer, xxix. 294: 

Come'; Post hunc (i.e. Earl of Essex) insequitur clara de stirpe Dynasta 

South T-MTe suo diues quem South-Hamptonia magnum 

Vendicat heroem ; quo non formosior alter 
ASuit, aut docta iuuenis pra:^stantior arte ; 
"■"*■ Ora licet tenera vix dum lanugine vernent. 

2 Historical MSS. Commission, 7th Report (Appendix), p. 521 b. 



YOUTHFUL CAREER OF SOUTHAMPTON 659 

servants, but first on the list stood the name of young Southampton. 
The purpose did not take effect, but the comphment of nomination 
was, at his age, without precedent outside the circle of the Sov- 
ereign's kinsmen. On November 17, 1595, he appeared in the lists 
set up in the Queen's presence in honour of the thirty-seventh 
anniversary of her accession. The poet George Peele pictured in 
blank verse the gorgeous scene, and likened the Earl of South- 
ampton to that ancient type of chivalry, Bevis of Southampton, 
so 'valiant in arms,' so 'gentle and debonair,' did he appear to aU 
beholders.^ 

But clouds were rising on this sunht horizon. Southampton, 
a wealthy peer without brothers or uncles, was the only male 
representative of his house. A lawful heir was essential Reluctance 
to the entail of his great possessions. Early marriages ^° marry. 
— chUd-marriages — were in vogue in all ranks of society, and 
Southampton's mother and guardian regarded matrimony at a 
tender age as especially incumbent on him in view of his rich 
heritage. When the boy was seventeen Burghley accordingly 
offered him a wife in the person of his granddaughter, Lady Eliza- 
beth Vere, eldest daughter of his daughter Anne and of the Earl of 
Oxford. The Countess of Southampton approved the match, and 
told Burghley that her son was not averse from it. Her wish was 
father to the thought. Southampton declined to marry to order, 
and, to the confusion of his friends, was still a bachelor when 
he came of age in 1594. Nor even then did there seem much 
prospect of his changing his condition. He was in some ways as 
young for his years in inward disposition as in outward appearance. 
Although gentle and amiable in most relations of life, he could 
be childishly self-willed and impulsive, and outbursts of anger 
involved him, at Court and elsewhere, in many petty quarrels 
which were with difficulty settled without bloodshed. Despite his 
rank and wealth, he was consequently accounted by many ladies 
of far too uncertain a temper to sustain marital responsibilities 
with credit. Lady Bridget Manners, sister of his friend the Earl 
of Rutland, was in 1 594 looking to matrimony for means of release 
from the servitude of a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Her guardian 
suggested that Southampton or the Earl of Bedford, who was 
intimate with Southampton and exactly of his age, would be an 
eligible suitor. Lady Bridget dissented. Southampton and his 
friend were, she objected, 'so young,' 'fantastical,' and volatile 
('so easily carried away'), that should iU fortune befaU her mother, 
who was 'her only stay,' she 'doubted their carriage of themselves.' 
She spoke, she said, from observation.^ 

' Peele's Anglorum Ferice. 

2 Cal. of the Duke of Rutland's MSS. i. 321. Bamabe Barnes, who was one of South- 
ampton's poetic admirers, addressed a crude sonnet to 'the Beautiful Lady, The Lady 
Bridget Manners,' in 1593, at the same time as he addressed one to Southampton. Both 



66o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In 1595, at two-and- twenty, Southampton justified Lady 
Bridget's censure by a public proof of his falhbility. The fair 
J . Mistress Vernon (first cousin of the Earl of Essex), 

with a passionate beauty of the Court, cast her spell on 

Elizabeth ^^1. Her virtue was none too stable, and in September 
the scandal spread that Southampton was courting her 
'with too much familiarity.' The entanglement with 'his fair 
mistress ' opened a new chapter in Southampton's career, and life's 
tempests began in earnest. Either to free himself from his mis- 
tress's toils, or to divert attention from his intrigue, he in 1596 
withdrew from Court and sought sterner occupation. Despite his 
mistress's lamentations, which the Court gossips duly chronicled, 
he played a part with his friend Essex in the military and naval 
expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and in that to the Azores in 1597. 
He developed a martial ardour which brought him renown, and 
Mars (his admirers said) vied with Mercury for his allegiance. He 
travelled on the Continent, and finally, in 1598, he accepted a 
subordinate place in the suite of the Queen's Secretary, Sir Robert 
Cecil, who was going on an embassy to Paris. But Mistress Ver- 
non was stiU fated to be his evil genius, and Southampton learnt 
Marriage while in Paris that her condition rendered marriage 
in 1598. essential to her decaying reputation. He hurried to 

London and, yielding his own scruples to her entreaties, secretly 
made her his wife during the few days he stayed in this country. 
The step was full of peril. To marry a lady of the Court without 
the Queen's consent infringed a prerogative of the Crown by which 
Elizabeth set exaggerated store. 

The story of Southampton's marriage was soon public property. 
His wife quickly became a mother, and when he crossed the Chan- 
nel a few weeks later to revisit her he was received by pursuivants, 
who had the Queen's orders to carry him to the Fleet prison. For 
the time his career was ruined. Although he was soon released 
from gaol, all avenues to the Queen's favour were closed to him. 
He sought employment in the wars in Ireland, but high command 
was denied him. Helpless and hopeless, he late in 1600 joined 
Essex, another fallen favourite, in fomenting a rebellion in Lour 
don, in order to regain by force the positions each had forfeited. 
The attempt at insurrection failed, and the conspirators stood 
their trial on a capital charge of treason on February 19, 1600-1. 
Southampton was condemned to die, but the Queen's Secretary 
pleaded with her that 'the poor young earl, merely for the love 

are appended to Barnes's collection of sonnets and other poems entitled Parthenopke 
and Parthenophil (of. Arber's Garner, v. 486). Barnes apostrophises Lady Bridget as 
'fairest and sweetest 

Of all those sweet and fair flowers, 

The pride of chaste Cynthia's [i.e. Queen Elizabeth's] rich crown.' 



YOUTHFUL CAREER OF SOUTHAMPTON 66 1 

of Essex, had been drawn into this action,' and his punishment 
was commuted to imprisonment for Hfe. Further mitigation was 
not to be looked for while the Queen lived. But Essex, imprison. 
Southampton's friend, had been James's sworn ally, ment, 
The first act of James I as monarch of England was ^^°^~^- 
to set Southampton free (April lo, 1603). After a confinement 
of more than two years, Southampton resumed, under happier 
auspices, his place at Court. 

Southampton's later career does not directly concern the student 
of Shakespeare's biography. After Shakespeare had congratulated 
Southampton on his liberty in his Sonnet cvii., there j 
is no trace of further relations between them, although 
there is no reason to doubt that they remained friends to the end. 
Southampton on his release from prison was immediately installed 
a Knight of the Garter, and was appointed governor of the Isle 
of Wight, while an Act of Parliament relieved him of all the dis- 
abilities incident to his conviction of treason. He was thenceforth 
a prominent figure in Court festivities. He twice danced a coranto 
with the Queen at the magnificent entertainment given at White- 
hall on August 19, 1604, in honour of the Constable of Castile, the 
special ambassador of Spain, who had come to sign a treaty of 
peace between his sovereign and James I.^ But home politics 
proved no congenial field for the exercise of Southampton's energies. 
Quarrels with fellow-courtiers continued to jeopardise his fortunes. 
With Sir Robert Cecil, with Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, 
and with the Duke of Buckingham he had violent disputes. It 
was in the schemes for colonising the New World that Southamp- 
ton found an outlet for his impulsive activity. He helped to equip 
expeditions to Virginia, and acted as treasurer of the Virginia 
Company. The map of the country commemorates his labours 
as a colonial pioneer. In his honour were named Southampton 
Hundred, Hampton River, and Hampton Roads in Virginia. 
Finally, in the summer of 1624, at the age of fifty-one, Southampton, 
with characteristic spirit, took command of a troop of English 
volunteers which was raised to aid the Elector Palatine, husband 
of James I's daughter Elizabeth, in his struggle with the Emperor 
and the Catholics of Central Europe. With him went his eldest 
son. Lord Wriothesley. Both on landing in the Low Countries 
were attacked by fever. The younger man succumbed at once. 
The Earl regained sufficient strength to accompany his son's body 
to Bergen-op-Zoom, but there, on November 10, he j^g^th on 
himself died of a lethargy. Father and son were both Nov. 10, 
buried in the chancel of the church of Titchfield, ^^^'*' 
Hampshire, on December 28. Southampton thus outlived Shake- 
speare by more than eight years. 

' See p. 381 and note. 



IV 

THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 

Southampton's close relations with men of letters of his time 
give powerful corroboration of the theory that he was the patron 
g , whom Shakespeare commemorated in the 'Sonnets.' 

ton's collec- From earliest to latest manhood — throughout the 
tion of dissipations of Court life, amid the torments that his 

intrigue cost him, in the distractions of war and travel — 
the earl never ceased to cherish the passion for literature which 
was implanted in him in boyhood. His devotion to his old college, 
St. John's, is characteristic. When a new library was in course 
of construction there during the closing years of his life, South- 
ampton collected books to the value of 360Z. wherewith to furnish 
it. This 'monument of love,' as the CoUege authorities described 
the benefaction, may stiU be seen on the shelves of the CoUege 
library. The gift largely consisted of illuminated manuscripts — 
books of hours, legends of the saints, and mediaeval chronicles. 
Southampton caused his son to be educated at St. John's, and 
his wife expressed to the tutors the hope that the boy would 
'imitate' his father 'in his love to learning and to them.' 

Even the State papers and business correspondence in which 
Southampton's career is traced are enlivened by references to 
„ , his literary interests. Especially refreshing are the 

in his letters active signs vouchsafed there of his sympathy with 
to poems the great birth of English drama. It was with plays 
an p ay . ^-^^^ ^^^ joined Other noblemen in 1 598 in entertaining 
his chief, Sir Robert Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris 
of that embassy in which Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. 
In July following Southampton contrived to enclose in an official 
despatch from Paris 'certain songs' which he was anxious that 
Sir Robert Sidney, a friend of literary tastes, should share his 
delight in reading. Twelve months later, while Southampton 
was in Ireland, a letter to him from the countess attested that 
current literature was an everyday topic of their private talk. 
'All the news I can send you,' she wrote to her husband, 'that 
I think will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London 
that Sir John Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made 
father of a goodly mUler's thumb — a boy that's all head and very 

662 



SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITEJIARY PATRON 663 

little body ; but this is a secret.' ^ This cryptic sentence proves 
on the part of both earl and countess familiarity with Falstaff's 
adventures in Shakespeare's 'Henry IV,' where the fat knight 
apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as 'good pint pot' (Pt. I. 11. iv. 443). 
Who the acquaintances were about whom the countess jested 
thus lightly does not appear, but that Sir John, the father of ' the 
boy that was all head and very little body,' was a playful allusion 
to Sir John's creator is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. 
In the letters of Sir Tobie Matthew, many of which were written 
very early in the seventeenth century (although first published 
in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstaff seems to have been 
bestowed on Shakespeare: 'As that excellent author Sir John 
Falstaff sayes, "what for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, 
and libertie, I never dealt better since I was a man."' ^ 

When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn 
of 1599 in London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord 
Rutland 'come not to Court' but 'pass away the time His love of 
merely in going to plays every day.'^ It seems that the theatre, 
the fascination that the drama had for Southampton and his 
friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable 
of exerting on the emotions of the multitude. Southampton and 
Essex in February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of 
Shakespeare's 'Richard II' at the Globe Theatre on the day pre- 
ceding that fixed for their insurrection, in the hope that the play- 
scene of the deposition of a king might excite the citizens of 
London to countenance their rebellious design.* Imprisonment 
sharpened Southampton's zest for the theatre. Within a year of 
his release from the Tower in 1603 he entertained Queen Anne of 
Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage and his fellow 
players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden present the 
'old' play of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' whose 'wit and mirth' were 
calculated 'to please her Majesty exceedingly.' ^ 

But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton's 
literary predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic 
records of his political or domestic life, that the amplest Poetic 
proofs survive of his devotion to letters. From the adulation, 
hour that, as a handsome and accomplished lad, he joined the 
Court and made London his chief home, authors acknowledged 
his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality and 
form. He had in his Italian tutor Florio, whose circle of acquaint- 
ance included aU men of literary reputation, a mentor who allowed 
no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the 

1 The original letter is at Hatfield. The whole is printed in Historical Manuscripts 
Commission, 3rd Rep. p. 145. 

- The quotation is a confused reminiscence of Falstaflf's remarks in i Henry IV, II. iv. 
The last nine words are an exact quotation of lines igo-i. 

' Sidney Papers, ii. 132. ■> See pp. 254-5. ^ See p. 383 supra. 



664 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton's honour in con- 
temporary prose and verse. Soon after the publication, in April 
1593, of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' with its salutation of 
Bamaba Southampton, a more youthful apprentice to the poet's 
Barnes's craft, Barnabe Barnes, confided to a published sonnet 
sonnet, 1593. q£ unrestrained fervour his conviction that South- 
ampton's eyes — 'those heavenly lamps' — were the only sources 
of true poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed 'to 
the Right Noble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,' 
runs: 

Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand 
(Which sacred Muses make their instrument) 
These worthless leaves, which I to thee present, 
Sprung from a rude and unmanured land 
That with your countenance graced, they may withstand 
Hundred-eyed Envy's rough encounterment, 
Whose patronage can give encouragement, 
To scorn back-wounding Zoilus his band. 
Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes — 
Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light, 
Which give and take in course that holy fire — - 
To view my Muse with your judicial sight : 
Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise, 
Shall to thy virtues, of much worth, aspire. 

Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nashe, evinced 
little less enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly 
TomNashe's essay in romance, 'The Life of Jack WUton.' He 
addresses. describes Southampton, who was then scarcely of 
age, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets 
as of the poets themselves.' 'A new brain,' he exclaims, 'a new 
wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to 
posterity, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presumption.' ^ 
Although 'Jack Wilton' was the first book Nashe formally dedi- 
cated to Southampton, it is probable that Nashe had made an 
earlier bid for the earl's patronage. In a digression at the close 
of his ' Pierce Penndesse ' he grows eloquent in praise of one whom 
he entitles 'the matchless image of honour and magnificent re- 

1 See Nashe 's Works, ed. Mckerrow, ii. 201. The whole passage runs: 'How wel or ill 
I haue done in it, I am ignorant : (the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it 
selfe) : only your Honours applauding encouragement hath power to make mee arrogant. 
Incomprehensible is the heigth of your spirit both in heroical resolution and matters of 
conceit. Vnrepriueably perisheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper, which on the 
diamond rocke of your iudgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer 
and_ cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets them selues. Amongst 
their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then 1 speak English : 
that smal braine I haue, to no further vse I conuert saue to be kinde to my frends, and 
fatall to my enemies. A new brain, a new wit, a new stile, a new soule will I get mee to 
canonize your name to posteritie, if in this my first attempt I be not taxed of presump- 
tion. Of your gracious fauor I despaire not, for I am not altogether Fames out-cast. . . . 
Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues 
seeke to deriue their whole nourishing.' 



SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 665 

warder of vertue, Jove's eagle-borne Ganimede, thrice noble 
Amintas.' In a sonnet addressed to 'this renowned lord,' who 
'draws all hearts to his love,' Nashe expresses regret that the great 
poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate 'so special a 
pillar of nobility ' in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed to the 
' Faerie Queene ' ; and in the last lines of his sonnet Nashe suggests 
that Spenser suppressed the nobleman's name 

Because few words might not comprise thy fame.^ 

Southampton was beyond doubt the nobleman in question. It 
is certain, too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young 
men for whom Nashe, in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned 
'amorous villaneUos and qui passas.' One of the least reputable 
of these efforts of Nashe survives in an obscene love-poem entitled 
'The Choise of Valentines,' which may be dated in 1595. Not 
only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory sonnet, 
but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nashe addressed 
his young patron as his friend.' ^ 

1 The complimentary title of 'Amyntas,' which was naturalised in English literature 
by Abraham Fraunce's two renderings of Tasso's Aminta — one direct from the Italian 
and the other from the Latin version of Thomas Watson — was apparently bestowed by 
Spenser on the Earl of Derby in his Colin Clouts come home againe (1595); and some 
critics assume that Nashe referred in Pierce Pennilesse to that nobleman rather than to 
Southampton. But Nashe's comparison of his paragon to Ganymede suggests extreme 
youth, and Southampton was nineteen in 1592 while Derby was thirty-three. 'Amyntas' 
as a complimentary designation was widely used by the poets, and was not applied ex- 
clusively to any one patron of letters. It was bestowed on the poet Watson by Richard 
Barnfield and by other of Watson's panegyrists. 

2 Two manuscript copies of the poem, which was printed (privately) for the first time, 
under the editorship of Mr. John S. Farmer, in 1899, are extant — one among the Raw- 
linson poetical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and the other among the manuscripts 
in the Inner Temple Library (No. 538). The opening dedicatory sonnet, which is in- 
scribed 'to the right honorable the Lord S[outhampton]' runs: 

'Pardon, sweete flower of matchles poetrye, 

And fairest bud the red rose euer bare, 
Although my muse, devorst from deeper care, 

Presents thee with a wanton Elegie. 
'Ne blame my verse of loose unchastitye 

For painting forth the things that hidden are, 
Since all men act what I in speeche declare, 

Onlie induced with varietie. 
' Complaints and praises, every one can write, 

And passion out their pangs in statlie rimes ; 
But of loues pleasures none did euer write. 

That have succeeded in theis latter times. 
'Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle gree. 
And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.' 

The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and is succeeded by a second sonnet 
addressed by Nashe to his patron : 

'Thus hath my penne presum'd to please my friend. 

Oh mightst thou lykewise please Apollo's eye. 
No, Honor brookes no such impietie. 

Yet Ovid's wanton muse did not offend. 
'Heis the fountaiiie whence my streamesdo flowe — 

Forgive me if I speak as I was taught; 



666 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed 
to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard 
Markham's Grenvillc's glorious fight off the Azores. Markham 
sonnet, 1595- was not content to acknowledge with Barnes the in- 
spiriting force of his patron's eyes, but with blasphemous temerity- 
asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of 
the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty God. Markham's 
sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus : 

Thou glorious laurel of the Muses' hill, 

Whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen, 
Bright lamp of virtue, in whose sacred skiU 

Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men, 
From graver subjects of thy grave assays, 

Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines — 
The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise 
True honour's spirit in her rough designs — 
And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song 
Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears 
Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessed tongue 
Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres ; 

So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee 

And from thy lips suck their eternity. 

Subsequently Florio, in associating the earl's name with his 
great Italian-EngUsh dictionary — the ' Worlde of Wordes' — more 
Florio's soberly defined the earl's place in the republic of letters 

address. when he wrote : ' As to me and many more the glorious 
and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.' ^ 
A tribute which Thomas Heywood, the dramatist and Shake- 
Alike to women, utter all I knowe, 
As longing to unlade so bad a fraught. 
' My mynde once purg'd of such lascivious witt, 

With purified words and hallowed verse. 

Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse, 

That better maie thy grauer view befitt. 

'Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I write 

Or for attempting banish me your sight. 

'Thomas Nashe.' 

1 In 1597 William Burton (1575-1645) dedicated to Southampton his translation of 
Achilles Tatius — a very rare book (cf. Times Lit. Suppl. Feb. 10, 1905). In 1600 Edward 
Blount, a professional friend of the publisher Thorpe, dedicated one of his publications 
{The Historic of the Uniting of the Kingdom of Portugall to the Crowne of Castill) 'to the 
most noble and aboundant president both of Honor and Vertue, Henry Earle of South- 
ampton.' 'In such proper and plaine language' (Blount wrote 'to the right honourable 
and worthy Earl') 'as a most humble and affectionate duetie I doo heere offer upon the 
altar of my hart, the first fruits of my long growing endevors ; which (with much con- 
stancie and confidence) I have cherished, onely waiting this happy opportunity to make 
them manifest to your Lordship : where now if (in respect of the knowne distance betwixt 
the height of your Honorable spirit and the flatnesse of my poore abilities) they turne 
into smoake and vanish ere they can reach a degree of your merite, vouchsafe yet (most 
excellent Earle) to remember it was a fire that kindled them and gave them life at least, 
if not lasting. Your Honor's patronage is the onely object I aime at; and were the 
worthinesse of this Historic I present such as might warrant me an election out of a worlde 
of nobilitie, I woulde still pursue the happines of my first choise.' 



SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON 667 

speare's friend, rendered the Earl's memory just after his 
death, suggests that Heywood was an early member of that 
circle of poetic clients whom Florio had in mind, t^- 

, ^ . . . . r -r^ • -r 1 nomas 

In A Funeral Elegie upon the death of Kmg James Heywood's 
which Heywood pubhshed in 1625 within a few months '^"^"te. 
of Southampton's death he thus commemorates his relations with 
Southampton : 

Henry, Southampton's Earle, a souldier proved, 
Dreaded in warre, and in milde peace beloved : 
O ! give me leave a little to resound 
His memory, as most in dutie bound. 
Because his servant once. 

The precise significance which attaches to the word 'servant' in 
Heywood's lines is an open question. Heywood was a prominent 
actor as well as dramatist, and his earliest theatrical patron was the 
Earl of Worcester, to whom he dedicates his elegy on King James. 
There is no evidence that Southampton took any company of 
actors under his patronage, and Heywood when he caUs himself 
Southampton's 'servant once' was doubtless vaguely recalling his 
association with the Earl as one of his many poetic clients.^ 

The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to 
be found, as I have already argued, in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' 
The same note of eulogy was sounded by men of letters „, 
until Southampton's death. When he was released gratuktions 
from prison on James I's accession in April 1603, -^ ^j^^^^"^*^^ 
his praises in poets' mouths were especially abundant. 
Not only was that grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare 
in what is probably the latest of his 'Sonnets' (No. cvii.), but 
Samuel Daniel and John Davies of Hereford offered the Earl 
congratulation in more prolonged strains. Daniel addressed to 
Southampton many lines like these : 

The world had never taken so full note 

Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone : 

And only thy affliction hath begot 

More fame than thy best fortunes could have won ; 

For ever by adversity are wrought 

The greatest works of admiration : 

And all the fair examples of renown 

Out of distress and misery are grown ; . . . 

Only the best-compos'd and worthiest hearts 

God sets to act the hard'st and constant's! parts.^ 

1 J. P. Collier's Bibliographical Account of Early English Literature, i. 37i-3- 

2 Daniel's Certaine Epistles, 1603: see Daniel's Works, ed. Grosart, i. 217 seq. 



668 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Davies was more jubilant : 

Now wisest men witli mirth do seem stark mad, 
And cannot choose — their hearts are all so glad. 
Then let's be merry in our God and King, 
That made us merry, being ill bestead. 
Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling. 
And on the viol there sweet praises sing. 
For he is come that grace to all doth bring.^ 

Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or 
Lok), George Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, 
George Wither, Sir John Beaumont, and others could be quoted. 
Musicians as weU as poets acknowledged his cultivated tastes, and 
a popular piece of instrumental music which Captain Tobias Hume 
included in his volume of 'Poetical Musicke' in 1607 bore the title 
of 'The Earl of Southamptons favoret.' ^ Sir John Beaumont, 
on Southampton's death, wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in 
the varied capacities of warrior, councillor, courtier, father, and 
husband. But it is as a literary patron that Beaumont insists 
that he chiefly deserves remembrance : 

I keep that glory last which is the best. 
The love of learning which he oft expressed 
In conversation, and respect to those 
Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose. 

To the same effect are some twenty poems which were pub- 
lished in 1624, just after Southampton's death, in a volume en- 
Ele ieson titled 'Teares of the Isle of Wight, shed on the Tombe 
South- of their most noble valorous and loving Captaine and 

ampton. Governour, the right honorable Henrie, Earl of South- 
ampton.' The keynote is struck in the opening stanza of the 
first poem by one Francis Beale : 

Ye famous poets of the southern isle, 
Strain forth the raptures of your tragic muse, _ 
And with your Laureate pens come and compile 
The praises due to this great Lord : peruse 
His globe of worth, and eke his vertues brave. 
Like learned Maroes at Mecaenas' grave. 

1 See Preface to Davies's Microcosmos, 1603 (Davies's Works, ed. Grosart, i. 14). 
At the end of Davies's Microcosmos there is also a congratulatory sonnet addressed to 
Southampton on his liberation (ib. p. 96), beginning: 

'Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord, 
From the deep seas of danger and distress 
There like thou wast to be thrown overboard 
In every storm of discontentedness.' 

2 Other pieces in the collection bore such titles as 'The Earle of Sussex delight,' 'The 
Lady Arabellas favoret,' 'The Earl of Pembrokes Galiard,' and 'Sir Christopher Hattons 
Choice' (cf. Rimbault, Bibliotheca Madrigalia, p. 25). 



V 

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 

TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF . 

THESE . INSVING . SONNETS . 

MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE . 

AND . THAT . ETERNITIE . 

PROMISED . 

BY . 

OUR . EVER-LIVING . POET . 

WISHETH . 

THE . WELL-WISHING . 

ADVENTURER . IN . 

SETTING . 

FORTH . 

T. T. 

In 1598 Francis Meres enumerated among Shakespeare's best 
known works his ' sugar 'd sonnets among his private friends.' 
None of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' are known to have ^he pubiica- 
been in print when Meres wrote, but they were doubt- tion of the 
less in circulation in manuscript. In 1599 two of '^°^^^};^' 
them were prijited for the first time by the publisher, 
William Jaggard, in the opening pages of the first edition of ' The 
Passionate Pilgrim.' On January 3, 1599-1600, Eleazar Edgar, 
a publisher of smaU account, obtained a license for the publication 
of a work bearing the title 'A Booke called Amours by J. D., 
with certein other Sonnetes by W. S.' No book answering this 
description is extant. In any case it is doubtful if Edgar's venture 
concerned Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' It is more probable that his 
'W. S.' was William Smith, who had published a collection of 
sonnets entitled 'Chloris' in 1596.1 On May 20, 1609, a license 
for the pubhcation of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' was granted by 
the Stationers' Company to a publisher named Thomas Thorpe, 

1 Amours of J. D. were doubtless sonnets by Sir John Davies, of which only a few 
have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier's suggestion that J. D. was a mis- 
print for M. D., i.e. Michael Drayton, who gave the first edition of his sonnets in 1594 the 
title of Amours. That word was in France a common designation of collections of sonnets 
(of. Drayton's Poems, ed. Collier, Roxburghe Club, p. xxv). 

669 



670 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

and shortly afterwards the complete collection as they have reached 
us was published by Thorpe for the first time.^ To the volume 
Thorpe prefixed a dedication in the terms which are printed above. 
The words are fantastically arranged. In ordinary grammatical 
order they would run : ' The well- wishing adventurer in setting 
forth [i.e. the publisher] T[homas] T[horpe] wisheth Mr. W. H., 
the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, aU happiness and that 
eternity promised by our ever-living poet.' 

Few books of the sixteenth or seventeenth century were ushered 
into the world without a dedication. In most cases it was the 
work of the author, but numerous volumes, besides Shakespeare's 
'Sonnets,' are extant in which the publisher (and not the author) 
fills the rdle of dedicator. The cause of the substitution is not 
far to seek. The signing of the dedication was an assertion of 
full and responsible ownership in the publication, and the publisher 
in Shakespeare's lifetime was the full and responsible owner of a 
publication quite as often as the author. The modern conception 
of copyright had not yet been evolved. Whoever in the sixteenth 
or early seventeenth century was in actual possession of a manu- 
script was for practical purposes its full and responsible owner. 
Literary work largely circulated in manuscript.^ Scriveners 
made a precarious livelihood by multiplying written copies, and 
an enterprising publisher had many opportunities of becoming 
the owner of a popular book without the author's sanction or 
knowledge. When a volume in the reign of Elizabeth or James I 
was published independently of the author, the publisher exercised 
unchallenged all the owner's rights, not the least valued of which 
was that of choosing the patron of the enterprise, and of pen- 
Publishers' ning the dedicatory compliment above his signature, 
dedications. Occasionally circumstances might speciously justify 
the publisher's appearance in the guise of a dedicatof. In the case 
of a posthumous book it sometimes happened that the author's 
friends renounced ownership or neglected to assert it. In other 
instances, the absence of an author from London while his work 
was passing through the press might throw on the publisher the 
task of supplying the dedication without exposing him to any 
charge of sharp practice. But as a rule one of only two inferences 
is possible when a publisher's name figured at the foot of a dedica- 
tory epistle : either the author was ignorant of the publisher's 
design, or he had refused to countenance it, and was' openly defied. 
In the case of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' it may safely be assumed 
that Shakespeare received no notice of Thorpe's intention of pub- 
lishing the work, and that it was owing to the author's ingnorance 

1 A full account of Thorpe's relations with the Sonnets appears in my introduction to 
the facsimile of the original edition (Clarendon Press, 1905). 

2 See note to p. 158 supra. 



THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 671 

of the design that the dedication was composed and signed by the 
'well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.' 

But whether author or pubUsher chose the patron of his wares, 
the choice was determined by much the same considerations. 
Self-interest was the principle underlying transactions between 
literary patron and protege. Publisher, like author, commonly 
chose as patron a man or woman of wealth and social influence 
who might be expected to acknowledge the compliment either by 
pecuniary reward or by friendly advertisement of the volume in 
their own social circle. At times the publisher, slightly extending 
the field of choice, selected a personal friend or mercantile ac- 
quaintance who had rendered him some service in trade or pri- 
vate life, and was likely to appreciate such general expressions of 
good will as were the accepted topic of dedications. Nothing that 
was fantastic or mysterious entered into the Elizabethan or the 
Jacobean publishers' shrewd schemes of business, and it may 
be asserted with confidence that it was in the everyday prosaic 
conditions of current literary traffic that the publisher Thorpe, 
selected 'Mr. W. H.' as the patron of the original edition of Shake- 
speare's 'Sonnets.' 

A study of Thorpe's character and career clears the point of 
doubt. Thorpe has been described as a native of Warwickshire, 
Shakespeare's county, and a man eminent in his pro- Thorpe's 
fession. He was neither. He was a native of Barnet «"'y 1>*^- 
in Middlesex, where his father kept an inn, and he himself through 
thirty years' experience of the book trade held his own with 
difficulty in its humblest ranks. He enjoyed the customary pre- 
liminary training.! ^I- midsummer 1584 he was apprenticed for 
nine years to a reputable printer and stationer, Richard Watkins.^ 
Nearly ten years later he took up the freedom of the Stationers' 
Company, and was thereby qualified to set up as a publisher on 
his own account.^ He was not destitute of a taste for literature ; 
he knew scraps of Latin, and recognised a good manuscript when 
he saw one. But the ranks of London publishers were over- 
crowded, and such accomplishments as Thorpe possessed were 
poor compensation for a lack of capital or of family connections 
among those already established in the trade.* For many years 
he contented himself with an obscure situation as assistant or 
clerk to a stationer more favourably placed. 

It was as the self-appointed procurer and owner of an unprinted 
manuscript — a recognised role for novices to fill in the book trade 

1 The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arber's Transcript of the Registers of the 
Stationers' Company. 

2 Arber, ii. 124. ^Ib.W.Tii. 

* A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven 
years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared before gaining the freedom of the com- 
pany, either dying young or seeking another occupation (cf. Arber's Transcript, ii. 213). 



672 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of the period — that Thorpe made his first distinguishable appear- 
ance on the stage of Uterary history. In 1600 there fell into his 
His owner- hands in an unexplained manner a written copy of 
ship of the Marlowe's unprinted translation of the first book of 
of Marlowe's 'Lucan.' Thorpe confided his good fortune to Edward 
'Lucan.' Blount, then a stationer's assistant like himself, but 
with better prospects. Blount had already achieved a modest 
success in the same capacity of procurer or picker-up of neglected 
'copy.'^ In 1598 he became proprietor of Marlowe's unfinished 
and unpublished 'Hero and Leander,' and found among better- 
equipped friends in the trade both a printer and a publisher for 
his treasure-trove. Blount good-naturedly interested himself 
in Thorpe's 'find,' and it was through Blount's good offices that 
Peter Short undertook to print Thorpe's manuscript of Marlowe's 
'Lucan,' and Walter Burre agreed to sell it at his shop in St. Paul's 
Churchyard. As owner of the manuscript Thorpe exerted the 
right of choosing a patron for the venture and of supplying the 
Hisdedica- dedicatory epistle. The patron of his choice was 
tory address hjg friend Blount, and he made the dedication the 
BlounT'^'^ vehicle of his gratitude for the assistance he had 
in 1600. just received. The style of the dedication was some- 
what bombastic, but Thorpe showed a literary sense when he 
designated Marlowe 'that pure elemental wit,' and a good deal 
of dry humour in offering to 'his kind and true friend' Blount 
'some few instructions' whereby he might accommodate himself 
to the unaccustomed role of patron.^ For the conventional type 
of patron Thorpe disavowed respect. He preferred to place 
himself under the protection of a friend in the trade whose good 
will had already stood him in good stead, and was capable of 
benefiting him hereafter. 

This venture laid the foundation of Thorpe's fortunes. Three 
years later he was able to place his own name on the title-page 
of two humbler literary prizes — each an insignificant pamphlet 
on current events.^ Thenceforth for a dozen years his name 
reappeared annually on one, two, or three volumes. After 1614 
his operations were few and far between, and they ceased altogether 
in 1624. He seems to have ended his days in poverty, and has 

1 Cf. my paper 'An Elizabethan Bookseller' in Bibliographica, i. 474-98. 

2 Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and amply attests the purely 
commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. 'When I 
bring you the book,' he advises Blount, ' take physic and keep state. Assign me a time 
by your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a travel- 
ler. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would seern to have) 
judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised myself 
you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.' Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, 
challenges his patron's love 'both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.' 

3 One gave an account of the East India Company's fleet ; the other reported a speech 
delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress 
to London. 



THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 673 

been identified with the Thomas Thorpe who was granted an 
alms- room in the hospital of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on December 3, 
1635.1 

Thorpe was associated with the publication of twenty-nine 
volumes in all,^ including Marlowe's 'Lucan'; but in almost all 
his operations his personal energies were confined, character 
as in his initial enterprise, to procuring the manuscript, of his 
For a short period in 1608 he occupied a shop. The ^"siness. 
Tiger's Head, in St. Paul's Churchyard, and the fact was duly 
announced on the title-pages of three publications which he issued 
in that year.^ But his other undertakings were described on their 
title-pages as printed for him by one stationer and sold for him by 
another; and when any address found mention at all, it was the 
shopkeeper's address, and not his own. He never enjoyed in 
permanence the profits or dignity of printing his ' copy ' at a press 
of his own, or selling books on premises of his own, and he can claim 
the distinction of having pursued in this homeless fashion the 
well-defined profession of procurer of manuscripts for a longer 
period than any other known member of the Stationers' Company. 
Though many others began their career in that capacity, all except 
Thorpe, as far as they can be traced, either developed into printers 
or booksellers, or, failing in that, betook themselves to other trades. 

Very few of his wares does Thorpe appear to have procured 
direct from the authors. It is true that between 1605 and 161 1 
there were issued under his auspices some eight volumes of genuine 
hterary value, including, besides Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' three 
plays by Chapman,^ four works of Ben Jonson, and Coryat's 
'Odcombian Banquet.' But the taint of mysterious origin at- 
tached to most of his literary properties. He doubtless owed them 
to the exchange of a few pence or shillings with a scrivener's hire- 
ling; and the transaction was not one of which the author had 
cognisance. 

■ Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527. 

2 Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in 1605; two in 
1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 (i.e. the Sonnets); three in 1610 (i.e. 
Histrio-mastix, or the Playwright, as well as Healey's translations); two in 1611 ;_ one in 
1612; three in 1613; two in 1614; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1624. 
The last was a new edition of George Chapman's Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles 
Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in 1608. 

3 They were Wits A. B.C. or a cenlurie of Epigrams (anon.), by R. West of Magdalen 
College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library) ; Chapman's Byron, and Jonson's 
Masques of Blackness and Beauty. 

* Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought 
after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching 
one or two with or without the author's sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken par- 
ticular care with Jonson's books, but none of Jonson's works fell into his hands before 
1605 or after 1608, a small fraction of Jonson's literary life. It is significant that the 
author's dedication — the one certain mark of publication with the author's sanction — ■ 
appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in Byron. 
One or two copies of Thorpe's impression of All Fools have a dedication by the author, 
but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe's edition of Chapman's 
Gentleman Usher has any dedication. 



674 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

It is quite plain that no negotiation with the author preceded 
the formation of Thorpe's resolve to publish for the first time 
Shake- Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' in 1609. Had Shakespeare 

speare's associated himself with the enterprise, the world would 

publishers' fortunately have been spared Thorpe's dedication to 
hands. 'Mr. W. H.' 'T. T.'s' place would have been filled 

by 'W. S.' The whole transaction was in Thorpe's vein. Shake- 
speare's 'Sonnets' had been already circulating in manuscript for 
eleven years ; only two had as yet been printed, and those were 
issued by the publisher, William Jaggard, in the fraudulently 
christened volume, 'The Passionate PUgrim, by William Shake- 
speare,' in 1599. Shakespeare, except in the case of his two nar- 
rative poems, showed indifference to all questions touching the 
publication of his works. Of the sixteen plays of his that were 
published in his lifetime, not one was printed with his sanction. 
He made no audible protest when seven contemptible dramas in 
which he had no hand were published with his name or initials on 
the title-page while his fame was at its height. With only one 
publisher of his time, Richard Field, his fellow-townsman, who was 
responsible for the issue of 'Venus' and 'Lucrece,' is it likely that 
he came into personal relations, and there is nothing to show that 
he maintained relations with Field after the publication of 'Lucrece ' 
in 1594. 

In fitting accord with the circumstance that the publication 
of the 'Sonnets' was a tradesman's venture which ignored the 
author's feelings and rights, Thorpe in both the entry of the book 
in the Stationers' Registers and on its title-page brusquely desig- 
nated it ' Shakespeares Sonnets,' instead of following the more 
urbane collocation of words commonly adopted by living authors, 
viz. 'Sonnets by William Shakespeare.' ^ 

In framing the dedication Thorpe followed established precedent. 
Initials run riot over Elizabethan and Jacobean books. Printers 
J,, f and publishers, authors and contributors of prefatory 

initials in commendations were all in the habit of masking them- 
'^Fei"^*'°°^ selves behind such symbols. Patrons figured under 
bethan and initials in dedications somewhat less frequently than 
Jacobean other sharers in the book's production. But the 
conditions determining the employment of initials in 
that relation were well defined. The employment of initials in 
a dedication was a recognised mark of close friendship or intimacy 
between patron and dedicator. It was a sign that the patron's 
fame was limited to a smaU circle, and that the revelation of his 
fuU name was not a matter of interest to a wide public. Such 

1 The nearest parallel is the title Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591), a poetic miscellany 
piratically assigned to the poet Nicholas Breton by the stationer Richard Jones. But 
compare Churchyards Chippes (1575) and Churchyards Challenge (1593). 



THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 675 

are the dominant notes of almost all the extant dedications in which 
the patron is addressed by his initials. In 1598 Samuel Rowlands 
addressed the dedication of his 'Betraying of Christ' to his 'deare 
aSected frieiid Maister H. W., gentleman.' An edition of Robert 
Southwell's ' Short Rule of life ' which appeared in the same year 
bore a dedication addressed ' to my deare affected friend M. [i.e. 
Mr.] D. S., gentleman.' The poet Richard Barnfield also in the 
same year dedicated the opening sonnet in his 'Poems in divers 
Humours' to his 'friend Maister R. L.' In 1617 Dunstan Gale 
dedicated a poem, 'Pyramus and Thisbe,' to the 'worshipfuU his 
veiie friend D. [i.e. Dr.] B. H.' ^ 

There was nothing exceptional in the words of greeting which 
Thorpe addressed to his patron 'Mr. W. H.' Dedications of 
Shakespeare's time usually consisted of two distinct 
parts. There was a dedicatory epistle, which might of wishes 
touch at any length, in either verse or prose, on the for'happi- 
subject of the book and the writer's relations with his 'eternity' in 
patron. But there was usually, in addition, a pre- dedicatory 
liminary salutation confined to such a single sentence as ^ ^^ "^^" 
Thorpe displayed on the first page of his edition of Shakespeare's 
'Sonnets.' In that preliminary sentence the dedicator usually 
followed a widely adopted formula which was of great antiquity.^ 
He habitually 'wisheth' his patron one or more of such blessings 
as health, long fife, happiness, and eternity. 'All perseverance 
with soules happiness' Thomas Powell 'wisheth' the Countess of 
Kildare on the first page of his 'Passionate Poet' in 1601. 'AU 
happines' is the greeting of Thomas Watson, the sonnetteer, to 
his patron, the Earl of Oxford, on the threshold of Watson's 
'Passionate Century of Love.' There is hardly a book published 
by Robert Greene between 1580 and 1592 that does not open with 

an adjuration before the dedicatory epistle in the form : ' To 

• Robert Greene wisheth increase of honour with the fuU 

fruition of perfect felicity.' 

Thorpe in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' left the conventional saluta- 
tion to stand alone ; he omitted the supplement of a dedicatory 
epistle.^ There exists an abundance of contemporary examples 

1 Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under slightly different cir- 
cumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence 
of a close intimacy between dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.'s [i.e. possibly Richard 
Stafford's] 'Epistle dedicatorie' before his Heradilus (Oxford, 1609) was inscribed 'to 
his much honoured father S. F. S.' An Apologie for Women, or an Opposition to Mr. 
D. G. his assertion . . . by W. U. of Ex. in Ox. (Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to 'the 
honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.' This volume, published in the 
same year as Shakespeare's Sonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom 
with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day. 

- Dante emploj'ed it in the dedication of his Divina Commedia which ran ' Domino 
Kani Grandi de Scala devotissimus suus Dante Aligherius . . . vitam optat pertempora 
diuturna felicem et gloriosi nominis in perpetuum incrementum.' 

3 Thorpe's dedicatory formula and the type in which it was set were clearly influenced 
by Ben Jonson's form of dedication before the first edition of his Volpone (1607), which, 



676 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

of the dedicatory salutation without the sequel of the dedicatory 
epistle. Edmund Spenser's dedication of the 'Faerie Queene' 
to Elizabeth consists solely of the salutation in the form of an 
assurance that the writer 'consecrates these his labours to live 
with the eternitie of her fame.' Michael Drayton both in his 
'Idea, The Shepheard's Garland' (1593) and in his 'Poemes Lyrick 
and Pastorall' (1609) confined his address to his patron to a single 
sentence of salutation.^ Richard Brathwaite in 161 1 exclusively 
saluted the patron of his 'Golden Fleece' with 'the continuance 
of God's temporal! blessings in this life, with the crowne of im- 
mortalitie in the world to come ' ; while in like manner he greeted 
the patron of his 'Sonnets and Madrigals' in the same year with 
'the prosperitie of times successe in this life, with the reward of 
eternitie in the world to come.' It is 'happiness' and 'eternity,' 
or an equivalent paraphrase, that had the widest vogue among the 
good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the 
seventeenth century besought his patron's favour on the first page 
of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish 
imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreci- 
ation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporat- 
ing in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellish- 
ments of the accepted formula suggested by his author's writing.^ 
In his dedication of the 'Sonnets' to 'Mr. W. H.' he grafted on the 
common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare, 
after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, prophesied for his 
verse in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic magnilo- 
quence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase, 
'promised by our ever-living poet,' to the conventional dedicatory 
wish for his patron's 'aU happiness' and 'eternitie.'^ Thorpe 

like Shakespeare's Sonnets, was published by Thorpe and printed for him by George 
Eld. The preliminary leaf in Volpone was in short lines and in the same fount of capitals 
as was employed in Thorpe's dedication to 'Mr. W. H.' On the opening leaf of Volpone 
stands a greeting of ' The Two Famous Universities,' to which ' Ben : Jonson (The Grateful 
Acknowledger) dedicates both it [the play] and Himself e.' In very small type at the 
right-hand corner of the page, below the dedication, run the words 'There follows an 
Epistle if (you dare venture on) the length.' The Epistle begins overleaf. 

1 In the volume of 1593 the words run: 'To the noble and valorous gentleman Mas- 
ter Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde and worthy of aU honorable 
desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.' 

2 In 1610, in dedicating St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, 
Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as 'a desired citie sure in heaven,' and 
assigns to 'St. Augustine and his commentator Vives' a 'savour of the secular.' In the 
same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pronounces 
the book to be 'the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature 
greatest in the least; as Homer's Ilias in a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.' 
For other examples of Thorpe's pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, 
see pp. 679-80 note, and pp. 684-5. 

' The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe's salutation of happi- 
ness is met with in George Wither's Abuses Whipt and Stript (London, 1613). There the 
dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation 'To himself e G. W. wisheth all 
happinesse.' It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe's dedication to 
'Mr. W. H.' in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised 
that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at a feature common to scores 
of books. Since his Abuses was printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton — 



THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 677 

'wisheth' 'Mr. W. H.' 'eternity' no less grudgingly than 'our 
ever-living poet' offered his own friend the 'promise' of it in his 
'Sonnets.' 

Other phrases in Thorpe's dedicatory greeting have a tech- 
nical significance which exclusively concerns Thorpe's position 
as the publisher. In accordance with professional custom he 
dubbed himself 'the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.' 
Similarly, John Marston called himself ' my own setter-out ' when 
he assumed the rare responsibility of publishing one of his own 
plays (' Parasitaster or the Fawne' 1606), while the publisher 
Thomas Walkley, when reprinting Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Phil- 
aster' in 1622, wrote that he 'adventured to issue it' 'knowing how 
many well-wishers it had abroad.' 

Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before 
that to Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' His dedicatory experience was 
previously limited to the inscription of Marlowe's Ywe. 
'Lucan' in 1600 to Blount, his friend in the trade, dedications 
Three dedications by Thorpe survive of a date subse- by Thorpe, 
quent to the issue of the 'Sonnets.' One of these is addressed to 
John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke.^ But 
these three dedications aU prefaced volumes of translations by one 
John Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe's prey after 
the author had emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after 
landing. Thorpe chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pem- 
broke as patrons of Healey's unprinted manuscripts because they 
had been patrons of Healey before his expatriation and death. 
There is evidence to prove that in choosing a patron for the ' Son- 
nets,' and penning a dedication for the second time, he pursued 
the exact procedure that he had followed — deliberately and for 
reasons that he fully stated — in his first and only preceding dedi- 
catory venture. He chose his patron from the circle of his trade 
associates, and it must have been because his patron was a personal 
friend that he addressed him by his initials, 'W. H.' 

Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' is not the only volume of the period 
in the introductory pages of which the initials 'W. H.' play a 
prominent part. In 1606 one who concealed him- <^ jj > 
self under the same letters performed for 'A Foure- signs d'edi- 
fould Meditation' (a collection of pious poems which southw°ell's 
the Jesuit Robert Southwell left in manuscript at his poems 
death) the identical service that Thorpe performed '"^ '■^°^- 

the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of 'W. H.'s ' Southwell 
manuscript — there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind 'W. H.'s' greeting of 
Mathew Saunders (see below), but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied 
him with similar hints. 

1 Thorpe dedicated to Florio Epiclelus his Manuall, and Cebes his Table, out of Greek 
originallby lo. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke 5/. Aii%ustine, 0} 
the Citie of God. . . . Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey's Epictetus, 
1616. 



678 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

for Marlowe's 'Lucan' in 1600, and for Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' 
in 1609. In 1606 Southwell's manuscript feU into the hands of 
this ' W. H.,' and he published it through the agency of the printer, 
George Eld, and of an insignificant bookseller, Francis Burton.^ 
'W. H.,' in his capacity of owner, supplied the dedication with 
his own pen under his initials. Of the Jesuit's newly recovered 
poems 'W. H.' wrote, 'Long have they lien hidden in obscuritie, 
and haply had never seene the light, had not a meere accident 
conveyed them to my hands. But, having seriously perused them, 
loath I was that any who are religiously affected, should be deprived 
of so great a comfort, as the due consideration thereof may bring 
unto them.' 'W. H.' chose as patron of his venture one Mathew 
Saunders, Esq., and to the dedicatory epistle prefixed a conven- 
tional salutation wishing Saunders long life and prosperity. The 
greeting was printed in large and bold type thus : 

To the Right Worfhipfull and 

Vertuous Gentleman^ Mathew 
Saunders, Efquire. 

W. H. wifheth, with long life, a profperous 
achieuement of his good difires. 

There follows in small type, regularly printed across the page, 
a dedicatory letter — the frequent sequel of the dedicatory salu- 
tation — in which the writer, 'W. H.,' commends the religious 
temper of 'these meditations' and deprecates the coldness and 
sterility of his own 'conceits.' The dedicator signs himself at the 
bottom of the page 'Your Worships unfained affectionate, W. H.' ^ 
The two books — Southwell's 'Foure-fould Meditation' of 1606, 

1 Southwell's Foure-fould Meditation of 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one 
complete printed copy (lately in the library of Mr. Robert Hoe, of New York) having 
been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in 
the British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copyKn 
manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter 
to the Athenmum on November i, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of ' W. H.,' 
the dedicator of Southwell's poem, with Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.' 

2 A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy of those poems 
by Southwell which 'unfained affectionate W. H.' first gave to the printing press. The 
owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (a,s he indifferently spells his name) ' 
entered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an ' epistel dedicatorie ' 
which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. The 
words ran: 'To the right worshipfuU Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth 
the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continwance of wor- 
shipp in this worlde. And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe 
all worldes for ever.' 



THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 679 

and Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' of 1609 — have more in common 
than the appearance on the preHminary pages of the initials ' W. H.' 
in a prominent place, and of the common form of dedicatory saluta- 
tion. Both volumes, it was announced on the title-pages, came 
from the same press — the press of George Eld. Eld for many 
years co-operated with Thorpe in business. In 1605, and in each 
of the years 1607, 1608, 1609, and 1610 at least one of his ventures 
was pubUcly declared to be a specimen of Eld's typography. 
Many of Thorpe's books came forth without any mention of the 
printer ; but Eld's name figures more frequently upon them than 
that of any other printer. Between 1605 and 1609 it is likely that 
Eld printed all Thorpe's ' copy ' as matter of course and that he was 
in constant relations with him. 

There is httle doubt that the 'W. H.' of the Southwell volume 
was Mr. William Hall, who, when he procured that manuscript 
for pubUcation, was an humble auxiliary in the pub- <^ H'and 
lishing army.i William Hall, the 'W. H.' of the South- Mr! William 
well dedication, was too in all probability the ' Mr. W. ■^^^^• 
H.' of Thorpe's dedication of the 'Sonnets.'^ 

The objection that 'Mr. W. H.' could not have been Thorpe's 
friend in trade, because while wishing him all happiness and 
eternity Thorpe dubs him 'the onlie begetter of these -pheonlie 
insuing sonnets,' is not formidable. Thorpe did not em- begetter' 
ploy 'begetter' in the ordinary sense ^ but in much the ™o^j,°rCT.^^ 
same technical significance which other of his dedicatory 

» Hall flits rapidly across the stage of literary history. He served an apprenticeship 
to the printer and stationer John Allde from 1577 to 1584, and was admitted to the free- 
dom of the Stationers' Company in the latter year. For the long period of twenty-two 
years after his release from his indentures he was connected with the trade in a dependent 
capacity, doubtless as assistant to a master-stationer. When in 1606 the manuscnpt 
of Southwell's poems was conveyed to his hands and he adopted the recognised role of 
procurer of their publication, he had not set up in business for himself. It was only 
later in the same year (1606) that he obtained the license of the Stationers Company 
to inaugurate a press in his own name, and two years passed before he began busmess. 
In 1608 he obtained for publication a theological manuscript which appeared next year 
with his name on the title-page for the first time. This volume constituted the earliest 
credential of his independence. It entitled him to the prefix 'Mr.' in all social relations. 
Between 1609 and 1614 he printed some twenty volumes, most of them sermons and 
almost all devotional in tone. The most important of his secular undertaking was Guil- 
lim's far-famed Display of Ileraldrie, a folio issued in 1610. In 1612 Hall printed an 
account of the conviction and execution of a noted pickpocket, John Selman, who had 
been arrested while professionally engaged in the Royal Chapel at Whitehall. On the 
title-page Hall gave his own name by his initials only. The book was described m bold 
tvpe as 'printed by W. H.' and as on sale at the shop of Thomas Archer in St._ Pauls 
Churchyard. Hall was a careful printer with a healthy dread of misprints, but his busi- 
ness dw'indled after 1613, and, soon disposing of it to one John Beale, he disappeared into 
private life. , .. 

2 A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business for himself be- 
tween 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the Stationers' Company bearing 
at the required dates the initials of 'W. H.' But he was ordinarily known by his full 
name, and there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with 
Thorpe. . , , , . , 

3 Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bombast which 
it is often difficult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in i6io — the year after the 
issue of the Sonnets — Healey's Epiclelus his Manuall 'to a true fauorer of forward spirits, 



68o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

expressions bear. 'Begetter' when literally interpreted as applied 
to a literary work, means father, author, producer, and it cannot 
be seriously urged that Thorpe intended to describe 'Mr. W. H.' 
as the author of the 'Sonnets.' 'Begetter' has been used in the 
figurative sense of inspirer, and it is often assumed that by 'onlie 
begetter' Thorpe meant 'sole inspirer,' and that by the use of 
those words he intended to hint at the close relations subsisting 
between 'W. H.' and Shakespeare in the dramatist's early life; 
but that interpretation presents as we have seen numberless 
difficulties. Of the figurative meanings set in Elizabethan English 
on the word 'begetter,' that of 'inspirer' is by no means the only 
one or the most common. 'Beget' was not infrequently employed 
in the attenuated sense of 'get,' 'procure,' or 'obtain,' a sense 
which is easUy deducible from the original one of 'bring into being.' 
Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them 'in the very whirl 
wind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it 
smoothness.' 'I have some cousins german at Court,' wrote 
Dekker in 1602, in his 'Satiro-Mastix,' '[that] shall beget you the 
reversion of the Master of the King's Revels.' 'Mr. W. H.,' whom 
Thorpe described as 'the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,' 
was in all probability the acquirer or procurer of the manuscript, 
who brought the book into being either by first placing the manu- 
script in Thorpe's hands or by pointing out the means by which a 
copy might be acquired. To assign such significance to the word 
'begetter' was entirely in Thorpe's vein.^ Thorpe described his 
rdle in the enterprise of the 'Sonnets' as that of 'the well-wishing 
adventurer in setting forth,' i.e. the hopeful speculator in the 
scheme. 'Mr. W. H.' doubtless played the almost equally impor- 
tant part — one as well known then as now in commercial oper- 
ations — of the 'vendor' of the property to be exploited. A few 
years earlier, in 1600, one John Bodenham in similar circumstances 

Maister John Florio,' Thorpe writes of Epictetus's work: 'In all languages, ages, by all 
persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It filles not the hand with leaues, but 
fills ye head with lessons : nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is 
more sencejess than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.' In the same year, 
when dedicating Healey's translation of St. Augustine's Cilie of God to the Earl of Pem- 
broke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke's patronage of Healey's earlier eSorts in trans- 
lation thus: 'He that against detraction beyond expectation, then found your sweete 
patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of 
more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours 
more acceptance.' 

1 This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone's 
disciple, James Boswell the younger, who, like his master, was a bibliographical expert 
of the highest authority. For further evidence of the use of the word 'beget' in the 
sense of 'get,' 'gain,' or 'procure' in English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
see the present writer's Introduction to the Sonnets Facsimile (Oxford, 1905) PP- 38-9- 
The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators — men like Malone and Steevens 
— who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century should 
have failed to recognise any connection between 'Mr. W. H.' and Shakespeare's personal 
history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedica- 
tion during the nineteenth century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned 
the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archaeologists. 



THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.' 68 1 

made over to a ' stationer ' Hugh Astley an anthology of pubHshed 
and unpubhshed poetic quotations, which Astley issued under the 
title of 'Belvedere or The Garden of the Muses.' In a prefatory 
page Bodenham was called 'First causer and coUectour of these 
Flowers,' and at the end of the book 'The Gentleman who was the 
cause of this collection.' Thorpe applied to 'Mr. W. H.' the word 
'begetter' in the same sense as Astley applied the words 'first 
causer' and 'the cause' to John Bodenham, the procurer of the 
copy for his volume known as 'Belvedere' in 1600. 



VI 

' MR. WILLIAM HERBERT ' 

For some eighty years it has been very generally assumed that 
Shakespeare addressed the bulk of his sonnets to the young Earl 
Q . . , , of Pembroke. This theory owes its origin to a spe- 
notion that ciously lucky guess which was first disclosed to the 
'^"^d^ ^•' public in 1832, and won for a time almost universal 
'Mr. wil- acceptance.^ Thorpe's form of address was held to 
Ham Her- justify the mistaken inference that, whoever ' Mr. W. H.' 
may have been, he and no other was the hero of the 
alleged story of the ' Poems ' ; and the cornerstone of the Pembroke 
theory was the assumption that the letters 'Mr. W. H.' in the 
dedication did duty for the words 'Mr. William Herbert,' by which 
name the (third) Earl of Pembroke was represented as having been 
known in youth. The originators of the theory claimicd to dis- 
cover in the Earl of Pembroke the only young man of rank and 
wealth to whom the initials 'W. H.' applied at the needful dates. 
In thus interpreting the initials, the Pembroke theorists made a 
blunder that proves on examination to be fatal to their whole 
contention. 

The nobleman under consideration succeeded to the earldom of 
Pembroke on his father's death on January 19, 1601 (N.S.), when 
The Earl of ^^ ^^^ twenty years and nine months old, and from that 
Pembroke date it is unquestioned that he was always known by 
a°Lo?dHM- his lawful title. But it has been overlooked that the 
bertin designation 'Mr. WiUiam Herbert,' for which the 

youth. initials 'Mr. W. H.' have been long held to stand, could 

never in the mind of Thomas Thorpe or any other contemporary 

1 James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was 
the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1832. 
A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have 
reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden 
re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare's Sonnets which he published 
in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare's Atitobio graphical 
Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, sig- 
nificantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had 
not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare nor to 
critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The most 
arduous of its recent supporters was Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the 
Sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the 'dark lady' of the 
Sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke's mistress. 
Tyler endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely 
repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April 1899 under the 
title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory: a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories by Lady New- 
degate and by myself]. 

682 



'MR. WILLIAM HERBERT' 683 

have denominated the earl at any moment of his career. When 
he came into the world on April g, 1580, his father had been (the 
second) Earl of Pembroke for ten years, and he, as the eldest son, 
was from the hour of his birth known in all relations of life — even 
in the baptismal entry in the parish register — by the title of Lord 
Herbert, and by no other. During the lifetime of his father and 
his own minority several references were made to him in the extant 
correspondence of friends of varying degrees of intimacy. He is 
called by them, without exception, 'my Lord Herbert,' 'the Lord 
Herbert,' or 'Lord Herbert.' ^ It is true that as the eldest son of 
an earl he held the title by courtesy, but for all practical purposes 
it was as well recognised in common speech as if he had been a peer 
in his own right. No one nowadays would address in current 
parlance, or entertain the conception of. Viscount Cranborne, the 
heir of the present Marquis of Salisbury, as 'Mr. R. C or 'Mr. 
Robert Cecil.' It is no more legitimate to assert that it would 
have occurred to an Elizabethan — least of all to a personal ac- 
quaintance or to a publisher who stood toward his patron in the 
relation of a personal dependent — to describe ' young Lord Her- 
bert,' of Elizabeth's reign, as 'Mr. WiUiam Herbert.' A lawyer, 
who in the way of business might have to mention the young 
lord's name in a legal document, would have entered it as 'Wil- 
liam Herbert, commonly called Lord Herbert.' The appellation 
'Mr.' was not used loosely then as now, but indicated a precise 
social grade. Thorpe's employment of the prefix 'Mr.' without 
qualification is in itself fatal to the pretension that any lord, whether 
by right or courtesy, was intended.^ 

Proof is at hand to establish that Thorpe was under no mis- 
apprehension as to the proper appellation of the Earl of Pembroke, 
and was incapable of venturing on the meaningless misnomer 
of 'Mr. W. H.' Insignificant publisher though he was, and 

1 Cf. Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. 'My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with my 
Lord Harbert (is) come up to see the Queen' (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, 
October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595) ; and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). 
John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August i, 1599, ' Young Lord Harbert, 
Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall set 
the best legge foremost.' Chamberlain's Letters (Camden Soc), p. S7- 

- Thomas Sackville, the author of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and 
other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was born plain 'Thomas Sackville,' 
and was ordinarily addressed in youth as 'Mr. Sackville.' He wrote all his_ literary 
work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature 
for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604 — 
at the age of sLxty-eight — he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful epfusions, 
which bore his early signature, 'M. [i.e. Mr.) Sackville,' were reprinted with that signature 
unaltered in an encyclopaedic anthology, England's Parnassus, which was published, 
wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About 
the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unau- 
thorised by him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original 
te.xt ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no 
sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, 
metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke 'Mr. W. H.' As might be 
anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity. 



684 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

sceptical as he was of the merits of noble patrons, he was not proof 
against the temptation, when an opportunity was directly offered 
Thorpe's him, of adorning the prefatory pages of a publication 
mode of with the name of a nobleman, who enjoyed the high 

the Earrof official Station, the literary culture, and the social influ- 
Pembroke. gnce of the third Earl of Pembroke. In 1610 — a 
year after he published the ' Sonnets ' — there came into his hands 
the manuscripts of John Healey, that humble literary aspirant who 
had a few months before emigrated to Virginia, and had, it would 
seem, died there. Healey, before leaving England, had secured 
through the good offices of John Florio (a man of influence in both 
fashionable and literary circles) the patronage of the Earl of 
Pembroke for a translation of Bishop Hall's fanciful satire, 'Mun- 
dus alter et idem.' Calling his book 'The Discoverie of a New 
World,' Healey had prefixed to it, in 1609, an epistle inscribed in 
garish terms of flattery to the 'Truest mirrour of truest honor, 
WilUam Earl of Pembroke.' ^ When Thorpe subsequently made 
up his mind to publish, on his own account, other translations by 
the same hand, he found it desirable to seek the same patron. 
Accordingly, in 16 10, he prefixed in his own name, to an edition of 
Healey's translation of St. Augustine's ' Citie of God,' a dedicatory 
address ' to the honorablest patron of the Muses and good mindes, 
Lord Wniiam, Earle of Pembroke, Knight of the Honourable 
Order (of the Garter), &c.' In involved sentences Thorpe teUs the 
' right gracious and gracef ule Lord ' how the author left the work 
at death to be a ' testimonie of gratitude, observance, and heart's 
honor to your honour.' 'Wherefore,' he explains, 'his legacie, 
laide at your Honour's feete, is rather here delivered to your Hon- 
our's humbly thrise-kissed hands by his poore delegate. Your 
Lordship's true devoted, Th. Th.' 

Again, in 1616, when Thorpe procured the issue of a second 
edition of another of Healey's translations, 'Epictetus ManuaU. 
Cebes Table. Theophrastus Characters,' he supplied more con- 
spicuous evidence of the servility with wlaich he deemed it incum- 
bent on him to approach a potent patron. As this address by 
Thorpe to Pembroke is difficult of access, I give it in extenso : 

'To the Right Honourable, WiUiam Earle of Pembroke, Lord 

Chamberlaine to His Majestie, one of his most honorable Privie 

CounseU, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, &c. 

'Right Honorable. — It may worthUy seeme strange unto your 

Lordship, out of what frenzy one of my meanenesse hath presumed 

to commit this Sacriledge, in the straightnesse of your Lordship's 

1 An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian — none is in the British Mu- 
seum — shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. 
Thorpe had no concern in this volume. 



'MR. WILLIAM HERBERT' 685 

leisure, to present a peece, for matter and model so unworthy, and 
in this scribbling age, wherein great persons are so pestered dayly 
with Dedications. All I can alledge in extenuation of so many 
incongruities, is the bequest of a deceased Man ; who (in his life- 
time) having offered some translations of his unto your Lordship, 
ever wisht if these ensuing were published they might onely bee 
addressed unto your Lordship, as the last Testimony of his dutifull 
affection (to use his own termes) The true and reall upholder of 
Learned endeavors. This, therefore, beeing left unto mee, as a 
Legacie unto your Lordship (pardon my presumption, great Lord, 
from so meane a man to so great a person) I could not without 
some impiety present it to any other ; such a sad priviledge have 
the bequests of the dead, and so obligatory they are, more than the 
requests of the living. In the hope of this honourable acceptance 
I will ever rest, 

'Your lordship's humble devoted, 

'T. Th.' 

With such obeisances did publishers then habitually creep into 
the presence of the nobility. In fact, the law which rigorously 
maintained the privileges of peers left them no option. The alleged 
erroneous form of address in the dedication of Shakespeare's 
' Sonnets' — ' Mr. W. H.' for Lord Herbert or the Earl of Pembroke 

— would have amounted to the offence of defamation. And for 
that misdemeanour the Star Chamber, always active in protecting 
the dignity of peers, would have promptly called Thorpe to ac- 
count.^ 

Of the Earl of Pembroke, and of his brother the Earl of Mont- 
gomery, it was stated a few years later, 'from just observation,' 
on very pertinent authority, that ' no men came near their lordships 
[in their capacity of literary patrons], but with a kind of religious 
address.' These words figure in the prefatory epistle which two 
actor-friends of Shakespeare addressed to the two Earls in the 
posthumously issued First Folio of the dramatist's works. Thorpe's 
'kind of religious address' on seeking Lord Pembroke's patronage 
for Healey's books was somewhat more unctuous than was cus- 
tomary or needful. But of erring conspicuously in an opposite 
direction he may, without misgiving, be pronounced innocent. 

1 On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star 
Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as 'goodman Morley.' A technical defect 

— the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence — in the bill of indictment led 
to a dismissal of the cause. See Lcs Reportes del Cases in Camera Skllata, 159,", to 1609, 
edited from the manuscript of John Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed 
for Alfred Morrison), p. 348. 



VII 

SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF PEMBROKE 

With the disposal of the allegation that ' Mr. W. H.' represented the 
Earl of Pembroke's youthful name, the whole theory of that earl's 
identity with Shakespeare's friend collapses. Outside Thorpe's 
dedicatory words, only two scraps of evidence with an}^ title to 
consideration have been adduced to show that Shakespeare was at 
any time or in any way associated with Pembroke. 

In the late autumn of 1603 James I and his Court were installed 
at the Earl of Pembroke's house at Wilton for a period of two 
Shakespeare "^onths, owing to the prevalence of the plague in 
with the London. By order of the officers of the royal house- 
company hold, the King's company of players, of which Shake- 
at Wilton speare was a member, gave a performance before the 
in 1603. King at Wilton House on December 2. The actors 
travelled from Mortlake for the purpose, and were paid in the ordi- 
nary manner by the treasurer of the royal household out of the 
public funds. There is no positive evidence that Shakespeare at- 
tended at Wilton with the company, but assuming, as is probable, 
that he did, the Earl of Pembroke can be held no more responsible 
for his presence than for his repeated presence under the same 
conditions at Whitehall. The visit of the King's players to WUton 
in 1603 has no bearing on the Earl of Pembroke's alleged relations 
with Shakespeare.^ 

1 See p. 377. A tradition sprang up at Wilton at the end of the last century to the 
effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son 
the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to 
witness a performance oi As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, 'We have 
the man Shakespeare with us.' No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is 
forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circum- 
stances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely mis- 
represented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his 
comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there 
in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been 
at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode 
of referring to literary men is well known : she treated them on terms of equality, and 
could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the 
man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London 
picture-dealer in 1897 what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, 
and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth 
century, containing some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet Ixxxi. (9-14), subscribed with 
the words 'Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603.' The ink and handwriting 
are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyesof anyone ac- 
customed to study manuscripts. On May 5, 1898, an expert examination was made 
of the portrait and the inscription, on the invitation of the present earl, and the inscrip- 
tion was unanimously rejected. 

686 



SHAKESPEARE AND LORD PEMBROKE 687 

The second instance of the association in the seventeenth century 
of Shakespeare's name with Pembroke's tells wholly against the 
conjectured intimacy. Seven years after the drama- rj,^^ dedica- 
tist's death, two of his friends and fellow-actors pre- tion of the 
pared the collective edition of his plays known as the ^"^^ ^°''°' 
Fiist Folio, and they dedicated the volume, in the conventional 
language of eulogy, ' To the most noble and incomparable paire of 
brethren, William Earl of Pembroke, &c.. Lord Chamberlaine to 
the King's most excellent Majesty, and Philip, Earl of Mont- 
gomery, &c., Gentleman of His Majesties Bedchamber. Both 
Knights of the most Noble Order of the Garter and our singular good 
Lords.' 

The choice of such patrons, whom, as the dedication intimated, 
'no one came near but with a kind of religious address,' proves 
no private sort of friendship between them and the dead author. 
To the two earls in partnership books of literary pretension were 
habitually dedicated at the period.^ Moreover, the third Earl of 
Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain in 1623, and exercised supreme 
authority in theatrical affairs. That his patronage should be 
sought for a collective edition of the works of the acknowledged 
master of the contemporary stage was natural. It is only sur- 
prising that the editors should have yielded to the vogue of solicit- 
ing the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain's brother in conjunction 
with the Lord Chamberlain. 

The sole passage in the editors' dedication that can be held 
to bear on the question of Shakespeare's alleged intimacy with 
Pembroke is to be found in their remarks: 'But since your lord- 
ships have beene pleas'd to thinke these trifles something, hereto- 
fore ; and have prosequuted both them, and their Authour living, 
with so much favour : we hope that (they outliving him, and he 
not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his 
owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them you 
have done unto their parent. There is a great difference, whether 
any Booke choose his Patrones, or find them : This hath done 
both. For, so much were your lordships' likings of the severall 
parts, when they were acted, as, before they were published, the 
Volume ask'd to be yours.' There is nothing whatever in these 
sentences that does more than justify the inference that the 
brothers shared the enthusiastic esteem which James I and all the 
noblemen of his Court extended to Shakespeare and his plays in the 
dramatist's lifetime. Apart from his work as a dramatist, Shake- 
speare, in his capacity of one of ' the King's servants ' or company of 
players, was personally known to aU the officers of the royal house- 

1 Cf. Ducci's Ars Aulica or The Courtier's Arte, 1607 ; Stephens's A World of Wonders, 
1607 ; and Gerardo The Unfortunate Spaniard, Leonard Digges's translation from the 

.Spanish, 1622. 



688 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

hold who collectively controlled theatrical representations at 
Court.' Throughout James I's reign his plays were repeatedly 
performed in the royal presence, and when the dedicators of the 
First Folio, at the conclusion of their address to Lords Pembroke 
and Montgomery, describe the dramatist's works as ' these remaines 
of your Servant Shakespeare,' they make it quite plain that it was 
in the capacity of 'King's servant' or player that they knew him 
to have been the object of their noble patrons' favour. 

The 'Sonnets' offer no internal indication that the Earl of 
Pembroke and Shakespeare ever saw each other. Nothing at all 
„ is deducible from the vague parallelisms that have been 

tion in the adduced between the earl's character and position in life 
'^onnets' ^.Tidi those with which the poet credited the youth of the 
youth's iden- 'Sonnets.' It may be granted that both had a mother 
Pembroke (Sonnet iii.), that both enjoyed wealth and rank, that 
both were regarded by admirers as cultivated, that 
both were self-indulgent in their relations with women, and that 
both in early manhood were indisposed to marry, owing to habits 
of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no 
evidence. The loveliness assigned to Shakespeare's youth was 
not, as far as we can learn, definitely set to Pembroke's account. 
Francis Davison, when dedicating his 'Poetical Rhapsody' to the 
earl in 1602 in a very eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously quali- 
fied reference to the attractiveness of his person in the lines : 

[His] outward shape, though it most lovely be, 
Doth in fair robes a fairer soul attire. 

The only portraits of him that survive represent him in middle 
age,^ and seem to confute the suggestion that he was reckoned 
handsome at any time of life; at most they confirm Anthony 
Wood's description of him as in person 'rather majestic than 
elegant.' But the point is not one of moment, and the argument 
neither gains nor loses, if we allow that Pembroke may, at any rate 
in the sight of a poetical panegyrist, have at one period reflected, 
like Shakespeare's youth, 'the lovely April of his mother's prime.' 
But when we have reckoned up the traits that can, on any 
showing, be admitted to be common to both Pembroke and Shake- 
speare's alleged friend, they all prove to be equally indistinctive. 
All could be matched without difficulty in a score of youthful 
noblemen and gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court. Direct external 
evidence of Shakespeare's friendly intercourse with one or other 
of Elizabeth's young courtiers must be produced before the 'Son- 
nets' ' general references to the youth's beauty and grace can 
render the remotest assistance in establishing his identity. 

' Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by 
Mytens. 



SHAKESPEARE AND LORD PEMBROKE 689 

Although it may be reckoned superfluous to adduce more argu- 
ments, negative or positive, against the theory that the Earl of 
Pembroke was a youthful friend of Shakespeare, it is . , , 
worth noting that John Aubrey, the Wiltshire anti- ignorance of 
quary, and the biographer of most Englishmen of dis- ^^ "'ation 
tinction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was Shakespeare 
zealously researching from 1650 onwards into the ^"^ , , 
careers alike of Shakespeare and of various members of 
the Earl of Pembroke's family — one of the chief in Wiltshire. 
Aubrey rescued from oblivion many anecdotes — scandalous and 
otherwise — both about the third Earl of Pembroke and about 
Shakespeare. Of the former he wrote in his 'Natural History of 
Wiltshire' (ed. Britton, 1847), recalling the earl's relations with 
Massinger and many other men of letters. Of Shakespeare, 
Aubrey narrated much lively gossip in his 'Lives of Eminent 
Persons.' But neither in his account of Pembroke nor in his 
account of Shakespeare does he give any hint that they were at 
any time or in any manner acquainted or associated with one 
another. Had close relations existed between them, it is impos- 
sible that all trace of them would have faded from the traditions 
that were current in Aubrey's time and were embodied in his 
writings.^ 

1 It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (pp. 194, 19s «.), to consider se- 
riously the suggestion that the 'dark lady' of the Sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour 
to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke's mistress and 
bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the Sonnets only on the assump- 
tion that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the Sonnets were addressed. Lady 
Newdegate's Gossip from a Muniment Room (1897), which furnishes for the first time a 
connected biography of Pembroke's mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope 
that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black -complexioned heroine. Lady 
Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary P'itton remain at Arbury, 
and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family 
history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately 
made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their 
authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second 
edition of Lady Newdegate's book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate's volume that 
Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, 
a married friend of the family. Sir William KnoUys. It has been lamely suggested by 
some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the 
persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and 
the supposititious 'Will Herbert' for 'the dark lady's' favours in the Sonnets (cxxxv., 
cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.). But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of 
those Sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet 
was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the 
Sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian 
name. 



2Y 



VIII 

THE ' WILL ' SONNETS 

No one has had the hardihood to assert that the text of the 'Son- 
nets' gives internally any indication that the youth's name took 
the hapless form of ' William Herbert ' ; but many commentators 
argue that in three or four sonnets Shakespeare admits in so many 
words that the youth bore his own Christian name of Will, and 
even that the disdainful lady had among her admirers other 
gentlemen entitled in familiar intercourse to similar designation. 
These are fantastic assumptions which rest on a misconception of 
Shakespeare's phraseology and of the character of the conceits of 
the 'Sonnets,' and are solely attributable to the fanatical anxiety 
of the supporters of the Pembroke theory to extort, at all hazards, 
some sort of evidence in their favour from Shakespeare's text.^ 

In two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) — the most artificial and 'con- 
ceited' in the collection — the poet plays somewhat enigmatically 
Elizabethan ^^ ^^^ Christian name of 'Will,' and a similar pun has 
meanings of been doubtfully detected in Sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. 
'will.' That Shakespeare was known to his intimates as 'WUl' 

is attested by the weU-known lines of his friend Thomas Heywood : 

'Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill 
Commanded mirth and passion was but Will.' ^ 

The groundwork of the sonnetteer's pleasantry is the identity in 
form of the proper name with the common noun 'wUl.' This 
word connoted in Elizabethan English a generous variety of con- 
ceptions, of most of which it has long since been deprived. Then, 
as now, it was employed in the general psychological sense of 
vohtion ; but it was more often specifically applied to two limited 
manifestations of the volition. It was the commonest of syn- 
onyms alike for ' self will ' or ' stubbornness ' — in which sense it 
still survives in 'wilful' — and for 'lust,' or 'sensual passion.' 
It also did occasional duty for its own diminutive 'wish,' for 'ca- 
price,' for 'goodwill,' and for 'free consent' (as nowadays in 'will- 
ing,' or ' willingly '). 

1 Edward Dowden (Sonnets, p. xxxv) writes: 'It appears from the punning sonnets 
(cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere's friend was the same as his 
own, Will,' and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical 
with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name. 

2 Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635). 

690 



THE 'WILL' SONNETS 691 

Shakespeare constantly used 'will' in all these significations, 
lago recognised its general psychological value when he said 'Our 
bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gar- shake- 
deners.' The conduct of the 'wiU' is discussed after speare's uses 
the manner of philosophy in 'TroUus and Cressida' of the word. 
(11. ii. 51--68). In another of lago's sentences, 'Love is merely 
a lust of the blood and a permission of the wUl,' light is shed on 
the process by which the word came to be specifically applied to 
sensual desire. The last is a favourite sense with Shakespeare and 
his contemporaries. Arigelo and Isabella, in ' Measure for Measure,' 
are at one in attributing their conflict to the former's 'will.' The 
self-indulgent Bertram, in 'All's Well,' 'fleshes his "will" in the 
spoil of a gentlewoman's honour.' In 'Hamlet' (iii. iv. 88) the 
prince warns his mother: 'And reason panders will.' In 'Lear' 
(iv. vi. 279) Regan's heartless plot to seduce her brother-in-law 
is assigned to ' the undistinguished space ' — the boundless range — 
'of woman's will.' Similarly, Sir PhUip Sidney apostrophised 
lust as 'thou web of will.' Thomas Lodge, in 'PhiJIis' (Sonnet 
xi.), warns lovers of the ruin that menaces all who 'guide their 
course by will.' Nicholas Breton's fantastic romance of 1599, 
entitled 'The Will of Wit, Wit's Will or Will's Wit, Chuse you 
whether,' is especially rich in like illustrations. Breton brings 
into marked prominence the antithesis which was familiar in his 
day between 'will' in its sensual meaning, and 'wit,' the Eliza- 
bethan synonym for reason or cognition. 'A song between Wit 
and WUl ' opens thus : 

Wit: What art thou. Will? Will: A babe of nature's brood. 
Wit: Who was thy sire? Will: Sweet Lust, as lovers say. 
Wit: Thy mother who ? Will: Wild lusty wanton blood. 
Wit: When wast thou born? Will: In merry month of May. 
Wit: And where brought up? Will: In school of little skill. 
Wit: What learn'dst thou there ? Will: Love is my lesson stDJ. 

Of the use of the word in the sense of stubbornness or self-will, 
Roger Ascham gives a good instance in his ' Scholemaster ' (1570), 
where he recommends that such a vice in children as 'will,' which 
he places in the category of lying, sloth, and disobedience, should 
be 'with sharp chastisement daily cut away.' ^ 'A woman will 
have her will ' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally pop- 
ular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the 
equivocal meaning of the last word. The phrase supplied the title 
of 'a pleasant comedy,' by William Haughton, which — from 1597 
onwards — held the stage for the unusually prolonged period of 
forty years. 'Women, because they cannot have their wills when 

1 Ed. Mayor, p. 35. 



692 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

they dye, they will have their wills while they live,' was a current 
witticism which the barrister Manningham deemed worthy of 
record in his 'Diary' in 1602.^ In William Goddard's 'Satirycall 
Dialogue' (1615?) 'Will' is personified as 'women's god,' and is 
introduced in female attire as presiding over a meeting of wives 
who are discontented with their husbands. 'Dame Will' opens 
the proceedings with an 'oration' addressed to her 'subjects' in 
which figure the lines : 

Know't I am Will,^ and will yeild you releife. 
Be bold to speake, I am the wine's delight, 
And euer was, and wilbe, th'usbandes spight. 

It was not only in the ' Sonnets ' that Shakespeare — almost 
invariably with a glance at its sensual significance — rang the 
Shake- changes on this many-faced verbal token. In his earliest 
speare's play, 'Love's Labour's Lost' (n. i. 97-101), after the 
the°word princess has tauntingly assured the King of Navarre 
that he will break his vow to avoid women's society, the 
king replies 'Not for the world, fair madam, by my wilV {i.e. 
willingly). The princess retorts 'Why will [i.e. sensual desire] 
shall break it [i.e.tYvt vow], will and nothing else.' In 'Much 
Ado' (v. iv. 26 seq.), when Benedick, anxious to marry Beatrice, 
is asked by the lady's uncle, 'What's your wiU?' he playfuUy 
lingers on the word in his answer. As for his 'wiU,' his 'wUl' is 
that the uncle's 'goodwill may stand with his' and Beatrice's 
'wiU' — in other words that the uncle may consent to their union. 
Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when the former 
misinterprets the young lady's ' What is your will ? ' into an inquiry 
into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth 
of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink 
is nowhere better illustrated than in the favour they bestowed on 
efforts to extract amusement from the parities and disparities of 
form and meaning subsisting between the words 'wUl' and 'wish,' 
the latter being in vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. 
Twice in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (i. iii. 63 and iv. ii. 96) 
Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram 
the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor's 'wish' 
is in harmony with another interlocutor's 'wiU.' 

It is in this vein of pleasantry — 'will' and 'wish' are identically 

1 Manningham's Diary, p. 92 ; cf. Bamabe Barnes's Odes Pastoral, sestine 2 : 

' But women will have their own wills, 
Alas, why then should I complain ? ' 

2 The text of this part of Goddard's volume is printed in italics, but the word 'Will,' 
which constantly recurs, is always distinguished by roman type. Goddard's very rare 
Dialogue was reprinted privately by Mr. John S. Farmer in 1897. 



THE 'WILL' SONNETS 693 

contrasted in Sonnet cxxxv. — that Shakespeare, to the confusion 
of modern readers, makes play with the word 'will' in the 'Son- 
nets,' and especially in the two sonnets (cxxv-vi.) which alone 
speciously justify the delusion that the lady is courted by two, or 
more than two, lovers of the name of WiU. 

One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this inter- 
pretation is that the word 'will' in these sonnets is frequently 
italicised in the original edition. But this has little 
or no bearing on the argument. The corrector of the an^'irregu- 
press recognised that Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. largely jar use of 
turned upon a simple pun between the writer's name of Elizabethan 
'Will' and the lady's ' will.' That fact, and no other, and 
he indicated very roughly by occasionally italicising the pr[°ters° 
crucial word. Typography at the time followed no 
firmly fixed rules, and, although 'will' figures in a more or less 
punning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer be- 
stowed on the word the distinction of italics in only ten instances, 
and those were selected arbitrarily. The italics indicate the 
obvious equivoque, and indicate it imperfectly. That is the ut- 
most that can be laid to their credit. They give no hint of the far 
more complicated punning that is alleged by those who believe 
that ' Will ' is used now as the name of the writer, and now as that 
of one or more of the rival suitors. In each of the two remaining 
sonnets that have been forced into the service of the theory, Nos. 
cxxxiv. and cxliii., ' will' occurs once only ; it alone is italicised in 
the second sonnet in the original edition, and there, in my opinion, 
arbitrarily and without just cause. ^ 

The general intention of the complex conceits of Sonnets cxxxv. 
and cxxxvi. becomes obvious when we bear in mind that in them 
Shakespeare exploits to the uttermost the verbal coin- 
cidences which are inherent in the Elizabethan word of Sonnets 
'will.' 'Will' is the Christian name of the enslaved ^"^g^^gt'^j 
writer; 'will' is the sentiment with which the lady "^ ^'^p'^^ ^ • 
inspires her worshippers; and 'will' designates stubbornness as 
well as sensual desire. These two characteristics, according to 
the poet's reiterated testimony, are the distinguishing marks of 
the lady's disposition. He often dwells elsewhere on her 'proud 
heart' or 'foul pride,' and her sensuality or 'foul faults.' These 
are her 'wills,' and they make up her being. In crediting the 
lady with such a constitution Shakespeare was not recording any 

■^ Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of 
special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often 
failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that 
did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. George 
Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the Quarto of 1609 (pp., 259 seq.) 
suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, 
but an exnmination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought 
me to an exactly opposite conclusion. 



694 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

definite observation or experience of his own, but was following, 
as was his custom, the conventional descriptions of the disdainful 
mistress common to all contemporary collections of sonnets. 
Bamabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from 
whose 'proud disdainfulness' he suffered, 

Why dost thou my delights delay. 

And with thy cross unkindness kills (sic) 

Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wiUs? 

Barnes answers his question in the next lines : 

But women will have their own wills, 
Since what she lists her heart fulfils.^ 

Similar passages abound in Elizabethan sonnets, but certain 
verbal similarities give good ground for regarding Shakespeare's 
'wdl' sonnets as deliberate adaptations — doubtless with satiric 
purpose — of Barnes's stereotyped reflections on women's obdu- 
racy. The form and the constant repetition of the word 'will' in 
these two sonnets of Shakespeare also seem to imitate derisively 
the same rival's Sonnets Ixxii. and Ixxiii. in which Barnes puts the 
words 'grace' and 'graces' through much the same evolutions as 
Shakespeare puts the words 'wih' and 'wills' in the Sonnets cxxxv. 
and cxxxvi.2 

Shakespeare's Sonnet cxxxv. runs : 

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, 
And will to boot, and will in over-plus ; 
More than enough am I that vex thee still, 
To thy sweet wiU making addition thus. 
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,^ 
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? 
Shall will in others seem right gracious. 
And in my will no fair acceptance shine ? 
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still. 
And in abundance addeth to his store ; 
So thou, being rich in will, add to thy will 
One will of mine, to make thy large will more. 

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill ; 

Think all but one, and me in that one — WUl. 

^ Barnes's Parihenophil in Arber's Garner, v. 440. 

- After quibbling in Sonnet Ixxii. on the resemblance between the graces of his cruel 
mistress's face and the Graces of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the 
next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own) : 

'Why did rich Nature graces grant to thee, 
Since thou art such a niggard of thy grace ? 
O how can graces in thy body be ? 
Where neither they nor pity find a place ! . . . 
Grant me some grace ! For thou with grace art wealthy 
And kindly may'st afford some gracious thing.' 

' Cf. Lear, iv. vi. 279, 'O undistinguish'd space of woman's will'; i.e. 'O boundless 
range of woman's lust.' 



THE 'WILL' SONNETS 695 

In the opening words, 'Whoever hath her wish,' the poet pre- 
pares the reader for the punning encounter by a slight variation 
on the current catch-phrase 'A woman will have her sonnet 
will.' At the next moment we are in the thick of the cxxxv. 
wordy fray. The lady has not only her lover named Will, but 
untold stores of ' will ' — in the sense alike of stubbornness and of 
lust — to which it seems supererogatory to make addition.' To 
the lady's ' over-plus ' of ' will ' is punningly attributed her defiance 
of the ' will ' of her suitor Will to enjoy her favours. At the same 
time 'will' in others proves to her 'right gracious,' ^ although in 
him it is unacceptable. All this, the poet hazily argues, should 
be otherwise ; for as the sea, although rich in water, does not re- 
fuse the falling rain, but freely adds it to its abundant store, so 
she, 'rich in will,' should accept her lover Will's 'will' and 'make 
her large will more.' The poet sums up his ambition in the final 
couplet : 

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill ; 

Think all but one, and me in that one — Will. 

This is as much as to say, 'Let not my mistress in her vmkindness 
kill any of her fair-spoken adorers. Rather let her think all who 
beseech her favours incorporate in one alone of her lovers — and 
that one the writer whose name of "Will" is a synonym for the 
passions that dominate her.' The thought is wiredrawn to inanity, 
but the words make it perfectly clear that the poet was the only 
one of the lady's lovers — to the definite exclusion of all others — 
whose name justified the quibbling pretence of identity with the 
'will' which controls her being. 

The same equivocating conceit of the poet Will's title to identity 
with the lady's ' will ' in all senses is pursued in Sonnet sonnet 
cxxxvi. The sonnet opens : cxxxvi. 

If thy soul check thee that I come so near, 
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy will,* 
And will thy soul knows is admitted there. 

' Edward Dowden says 'will to boot' is a reference to the Christian name of Shake- 
speare's friend, 'William [? Mr. W. H.]' {Sonnets, p. 236); but in my view the poet, 
in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with 
no uncommon practice of his. The line 'And will to boot, and will in over-plus,' is par- 
alleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as — 

'Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind' (cv. 5). 

'Beyond all date, even to eternity' (cxxii. 4). 

'Who art as black as hell, as dark as night' (cxlvii. 14). 

In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight 
intensification. 

2 C£. Barnes's Sonnet Ixxiii. : 

'All her looks gracious, yet no grace do bring 
To me, poor wretch ! Yet be the Graces there.' 

' Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the ' sightless view ' of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., 
and apostrophises the soul as the ' centre of his sinful earth ' in Sonnet cxlvi. 



696 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Here Shakespeare adapts to his punning purpose the familiar 
philosophic commonplace respecting the soul's domination by 
'will' or volition, which was more clearly expressed by his con- 
temporary, Sir John Davies, in the philosophic poem, 'Nosce 
Teipsum ' : 

Will holds the royal sceptre in the soul, 
And on the passions of the heart doth reign. 

Whether Shakespeare's lines be considered with their context 
or without it, the tenor of their thought and language positively 
refutes the commentators' notion that the 'will' admitted to the 
lady's soul is a rival lover named WiU. The succeeding lines run : 

Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.^ 
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love ; 
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one. 
In things of great receipt with ease we prove 
Among a number one is reckon'd none : 
Then in the number let me pass untold. 
Though in thy stores' account, I one must be ; 
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold 
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee. 

Here the poet Will continues to claim, in punning right of his 
Christian name, a place, however small and inconspicuous, among 
the 'wills,' the varied forms of will {i.e. lust, stubbornness, and 
willingness to accept others' attentions), which are the constituent 
elements of the lady's being. The plural 'wills' is twice used in 
identical sense by Barnabe Barnes in the lines already quoted : 

Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills. 
But women will have their own wills. 

Impulsively Shakespeare brings his fantastic pretension to a some- 
what more practical issue in the concluding apostrophe : 

Make but my name thy love, and love that still, 
And then thou lovest me — for my name is Will.^ 

That is equivalent to saying 'Make "will" ' {i.e. that which is 
yourself) 'your love, and then you love me, because Will is my 
name.' The couplet proves even more convincingly than the 
one which clinches the preceding sonnet that none of the rivals 

1 The use of the word 'fulfil' in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes's 
introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above : 

'Since what she lists her heart fulfils.' 

2 Thomas Tyler paraphrases these lines thus : ' You love your other admirer named 
Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is Will,' p. 297. Edward 
Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: 'Love only my name (something 
less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am 
all will, i.e. all desire.' 



THE 'WILL' SONNETS 697 

whom the poet sought to displace in the lady's affections could 
by any chance have been, like himself, called Will. The writer 
could not appeal to a mistress to concentrate her love on his name 
of Will, because it was the emphatic sign of identity between her 
being and him, if that name were common to him and one or more 
rivals, and lacked exclusive reference to himself. 

Loosely as Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' were constructed, the 
couplet at the conclusion of each poem invariably summarises the 
general intention of the preceding twelve lines. The concluding 
couplets of these two Sonnets cxxxv.-vi., in which Shakespeare 
has been alleged to acknowledge a rival of his own name in his 
suit for a lady's favour, are consequently the touchstone by which 
the theory of 'more Wills than one' must be tested. As we have 
just seen, the situation is summarily embodied in the first couplet 
thus: 

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill ; 

Think all but one, and me in that one — Will. 

It is re-embodied in the second couplet thus : 

Make but my name thy love, and love that still, 
And then thou lovest me — for my name is Will. 

The whole significance of both couplets resides in the twice- 
repeated fact that one, and only one, of the lady's lovers is named 
Will, and that that one is the writer. To assume that the poet 
had a rival of his own name is to denude both couplets of all point. 
'Will,' we have learned from the earlier lines of both sonnets, is 
the lady's ruling passion. Punning mock-logic brings the poet 
in either sonnet to the ultimate conclusion that one of her lovers 
may, above all others, reasonably claim her love on the ground 
that his name of Will is the name of her ruling passion. Thus his 
pretension to her affections rests, he punningly assures her, on a 
strictly logical basis. 

Unreasonable as any other interpretation of these sonnets 
(cxxxv.-vi.) seems to be, I believe it far more fatuous to seek in 
the single and isolated use of the word 'will' in each Sonnet 
of the Sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. any confirmation cxxxiv. 
of the theory of a rival suitor named Will. 

Sonnet cxxxiv. runs : 

So now I have confess'd that he is thine. 
And I myself am mortgaged to thy will.^ 
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine 
Thou wilt restore, to be my comfort still. 

' The word 'will' is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 
and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles 
Barnes's line quoted above : 

'Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills.' 



698 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, 
For thou art covetous and he is kind, 
He learn'd but surety-like to write for me. 
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. 
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, 
Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, 
And sue a friend came debtor for my sake ; 
So him I lose through my unkind abuse. 

Him have I lost ; thou hast both him and me ; 

He pays the whole, and yet am I not free. 

Here the poet describes himself as 'mortgaged to the lady's will' 
(i.e. to her personality, in which 'will,' in the double sense of 
stubbornness and sensual passion, is the strongest element). He 
deplores that the lady has captivated not merely himself, but also 
his friend, who made vicarious advances to her. 
Sonnet cxliii. runs : 

Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch 
One of her feathered creatures broke away. 
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift despatch 
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay ; 
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, 
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent 
To follow that which flies before her face. 
Not prizing her poor infant's discontent : 
So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee, 
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind ; 
But if thou catch thy hope turn back to me. 
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind : 
So wiU I pray that thou mayst have thy will,^ 
If thou turn back and my loud crying still. 

In this sonnet — which presents a very clear-cut picture, although 
its moral is somewhat equivocal — the poet represents the lady as 
Meaning of a country housewife and himself as her babe; while 
Sonnet cxliii. a^ acquaintance, who attracts the lady but is not at- 
tracted by her, is figured as a ' feathered creature ' in the house-wife's 
poultry-yard. The fowl takes to flight ; the housewife sets down 
her infant and pursues ' the thing.' The poet, believing apparently 
that he has little to fear from the harmless creature, lightly makes 
play with the current catch-phrase (' a woman will have her will ') , 
and amiably wishes his mistress success in her chase, on condition 
that, having recaptured the truant bird, she turn back and treat 
him, her babe, with kindness. In praying that the lady 'may 
have her will ' the poet is clearly appropriating the current catch- 
phrase, and no pun on a second suitor's name of 'Will' can be fairly 
wrested from the context. 

1 Because 'will' by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printed 
Will in the first edition of the Sonnets, Professor Dowden'^is inclined to accept a reference 
to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have 
her Will, i.e. the friend 'Will [? W. H.]' This interpretation seems to introduce a need- 
less complication. 



IX 

THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, 1591-1597 

The sonnetteering vogue, as I have already pointed out,^ reached 
its full height between 1591 and 1597, and when at its briskest it 
drew Shakespeare into its current. An enumeration of volumes 
containing sonnet-sequences or detached sonnets that were in cir- 
culation during the period best illustrates the overwhelming force 
of the sonnetteering rage of those years, and, with that end in 
view, I give here a bibliographical account, with a few critical notes, 
of the chief efforts of Shakespeare's rival sonnetteers.^ 

The earliest collections of sonnets to be published in England 
were those by the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, which 
first appeared in the publisher Tottel's poetical mis- 
cellany called 'Songes and Sonnetes' in 1557. This s^rrgy'|^°'^ 
volume included sixteen sonnets by Surrey and twenty Sonnets, 
by Wyatt. Many of them were translated directly Pj^il'^^*^*^ 
from Petrarch, and most of them treated conventionally 
of the torments of an unrequited love. Surrey included, however, 
three sonnets on the death of his friend Wyatt, and a fourth on the 
death of one Clere, a faithful follower. Tottel's volume was seven 
times reprinted by 1587. But no sustained endeavour was made 
to emulate the example of Surrey and Wyatt till Thomas Watson 
about 1580 circulated in manuscript his 'Booke of Passionate 
Sonnetes,' which he wrote for his patron, the Earl of Oxford. The 
volume was printed in 1582 under the title of ' EKATOMIIAOIA' 
or Passionate Centurie of Loue. Divided into two „, , , 

VVstson s 

parts: whereof the. first expresseth the Authours suf- 'Centurieof 
ferance on Loue : the latter his long farewell to Loue Loue,' 1582. 
and all his tyrannic. Composed by Thomas Watson, and pub- 

1 See p. 154 supra. A fuller account of the Elizabethan sonnet and its indebtedness 
to foreign masters is to be found in my preface to the two volumes of Elizahelliaii Sonnets 
(1904), in Messrs. Constable's revised edition of Arber's Eni^lish Garner. The Elizabethan 
sonnetteers' indebtedness to the French sonnetteers of the second half of the sixteenth 
century is treated in detail in my French Renaissance in England, O.xford, iQio. 

' The word 'sonnet' was often irregularly used for 'song' or 'poem.' Neither Barnabe 
Googe's Eglogs, Epyllaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile's Epitaphes, 
Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French 
word 'quatorzain' was the term almost as frequently applied as 'sonnet' to the fourteen- 
line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey ; cf. 'crazed quator- 
zains' in Thomas Nashe's preface to his edition of Sidney's Astrophcl and Stella, 1591; 
and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton's Sonnets, 
1 594. 

699 



yoo WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

lished at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes.' 
Watson's work, which he called ' a toy,' is a curious literary mosaic. 
He supplied to each poem a prose commentary, in which he not 
only admitted that every conceit was borrowed, but quoted chapter 
and verse for its origin from classical literature or from the work 
of French or Italian sonnetteers.^ Two regular quatorzains are 
prefixed, but to each of the 'passions' there is appended a four-line 
stanza which gives each poem eighteen instead of the regular four- 
teen lines. Watson's efforts were so well received, however, that 
he applied himself to the composition of a second series of sonnets 
in strict metre. This collection, entitled 'The Tears of Fancie,' 
only circulated in manuscript in his lifetime.^ 

Meanwhile a greater poet. Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, 
had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious 
collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of 
'Astrophel Sidney's sonnets were addressed by him under the 
and Stella,' name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically 
^^^^' designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted 

assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, 
and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat 
of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, 
Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney's efforts, 
and his addresses to abstractions like sleep, the moon, his muse, 
grief, or lust, are almost verbatim translations from the French. 
Sidney's sonnets were first published surreptitiously, under the 
title of 'Astrophel and Stella,' by a pubHshing adventurer named 
Thomas Newman, and in his first issue Newman added an appen- 
dix of ' sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentle- 
men.' Twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel were printed in the ap- 
pendix anonymously and without the author's knowledge. Two 
other editions of Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella' without the 
appendix were issued in the same year. Eight other of Sidney's 
sonnets, which still circulated only in manuscript, were first printed 
anonymously in 1594, with the sonnets of Henry Constable, and 
these were appended with some additions to the authentic edition 
of Sidney's 'Arcadia' and other works that appeared in 1598. 
Sidney enjoyed in the decade that followed his death the reputation 
of a demi-god, and the wide dissemination in print of his numerous 
sonnets in 1591 spurred nearly every living poet in England to 
emulate his achievement.^ 

1 See pp. 1 70-1 supra. 

2 All Watson's sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson's Poems, 1895; 'The 
Tears of Fancie' are in Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, i. 137-164. 

' In a preface to Newman's first edition of Astrophel and Stella the editor Thomas 
Nashe, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney's 
sonnets, exclaimed: 'Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers! and bequeath 
your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers, for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your 
legs.' ■ But the effect of Sidney's work was just the opposite to that which Nashe_ an- 
ticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since. 



VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 70 1 

In order to facilitate a comparison of Shakespeare's sonnets 
witli those of his contemporaries it will be best to classify the 
sonnetteering efforts that immediately succeeded Sidney's under 
the three headings of (i) sonnets of more or less feigned love, 
addressed to a more or less fictitious mistress ; (2) sonnets of 
adulation, addressed to patrons ; and (3) sonnets invoking meta- 
physical abstractions or treating impersonally of religion or 
philosophy.^ 

In February 1592 Samuel Daniel published a collection of 
fifty-five sonnets, with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to his 
patroness, Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, j collected 
As in many French volumes, the collection concluded sonnets of 
with an 'ode.'^ At every point Daniel betrayed his feigned love, 
indebtedness to French* sonnetteers, even when apologising for 
his inferiority to Petrarch (No. xxxviii.). His title he borrowed 
from the collection of Maurice Seve, whose assemblage of dixains 
called 'Delie, objet de plus haute vertu' (Lyon, Daniel's 
1544), was the pattern of many later sonnet sequences 'Delia,' 
on love. Many of Daniel's sonnets are adaptations ^^^^• 
or translations from the Italian. But he owes much to the 
French sonnetteers Du Bellay and Desportes. His methods of 
handling his material may be judged by a comparison of his Son- 
net xxvi. with Sonnet Ixii. in Desportes' collection, 'Cleonice: 
Dernieres Amours,' which was issued at Paris in 1575. 

Desportes' sonnet runs : 

Je verray par les ans vengeurs de mon martyre 
Que I'or de vos cheveux argente deviendra, 
Que de vos deux soleils la splendeur s'esteindra, 

Et qu'il faudra qu' Amour tout confus s'en retire. 

La beaute qui si douce a present vous inspire, 
Cedant aux lois du Temps ses faveurs reprendra, 
L'hiver de vostre taint les fleurettes perdra, 

Et ne laissera rien des thresors que i'admire. 

Cest orgueii desdaigneux qui vous fait ne m'aimer, 

En regret et chagrin se verra transformer, 

Avec le changement d'une image si belle : 
Et peut estre qu'alors vous n'aurez desplaisir 
De revivre en mes vers chauds d'amoureux desir, 

Ainsi que le Phenix au feu se renouvelle. 

This is Daniel's version, which he sent forth as an original pro- 
duction : 

^ With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets 
of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its pre- 
dominant characteristic. 

2 Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended 
to Sidney's Astrophel. These nine he permanently dropped. 



702 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

I once may see, when years may wreck my wrong, 
And golden hairs may change to silver wire ; 
And those bright rays (that kindle all this fire) 

Shall fail in force, their power not so strong. 

Her beauty, now the burden of my song, 

Whose glorious blaze the world's eye doth admire, 
Must jdeld her praise to tyrant Time's desire ; 

Then fades the flower, which fed her pride so long, 

When if she grieve to gaze her in her glass. 
Which then presents her winter- withered hue : 
Go you my verse ! go tell her what she was ! 
For what she was, she best may find in you. 

Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass. 
But Phcenix-like to make her live anew. 

In Daniel's beautiful sonnet (xlix.) beginning 

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, 
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, 

he echoes De Baif and Pierre de Brach's invocations of '0 Sommeil 
chasse-soin.' But again he chiefly relies on Desportes, whose 
words he adapts with very slight variations. Sonnet Ixxv. of 
Desportes' 'Amours d'Hippolyte' opens thus: 

Sommeil, paisible fils de la Nuict solitaire . . . 
O frere de la Mort, que tu m'es ennemi ! 

Daniel's sonnets were enthusiastically received. With some 
additions they were republished in 1594 with his narrative poem 
Fame of 'The Complaint of Rosamund.' The volume was 
Daniel's called 'Delia and Rosamund Augmented.' Spenser, 
sonnets. ^^ j^jg ' QoHu Clouts come home againe,' lauded the 
'well-tuned song' of Daniel's sonnets, and Shakespeare has some 
claim to be classed among Daniel's many sonnetteering disciples. 
The anonymous author of 'Zepheria' (1594) declared that the 
'sweet tuned accents' of 'Delian sonnetry' rang throughout 
England; while Bartholomew Griffin, in his 'Fidessa' (1596) 
openly plagiarised Daniel, invoking in his Sonnet xv. 'Care- 
charmer Sleep, . . . brother of quiet Death.' 

In September of the same year (1592) that saw the first complete 
version of Daniel's 'Delia,' Henry Constable published 'Diana: 
Constable's ^^^ Praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets.' 
'Diana,' Like the title, the general tone and many complete 
^59^- poems were drawn from Desportes' 'Amours de 

Diane.' Twenty-one poems were included, aU in the French vein. 
The collection was reissued, with very numerous additions, in 1594 
under the title 'Diana; or, The excellent conceitful Sonnets of 
H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and 
learned personages.' This volume is a typical venture of the book- 



VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 703 

sellers.' The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard 
Smith, supplied dedications respectively to the reader and to 
Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting. They had swept together 
sonnets in manuscript from all quarters and presented their cus- 
tomers with a disordered miscellany of what they called 'orphan 
poems.' Besides the twenty sonnets by Constable, eight were 
claimed for Sir Philip Sidney, and the remaining forty-seven are 
by various hands which have not as yet been identified. 

In 1593 the legion of sonnetteers received notable reinforce- 
ments. In May came out Barnabe Barnes's interesting volume, 
'Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, -g^^^^^'^ 
Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous sonnets, 
gentleman, M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend. '^ ^593- 
The contents of the volume and their arrangement closely resemble 
the sonnet-collections of Petrarch or the 'Amours' of Ronsard. 
There are a hundred and five sonnets altogether, interspersed with 
twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three 
'canzons,' and twenty 'odes,' one in sonnet form. There is, 
moreover, included what purports to be a translation of 'Moschus' 
first eidillion describing love,' but is clearly a rendering of a French 
poem by Amadis Jamyn, entitled 'Amour Fuitif, du grec de Mos- 
chus,' in his '(Euvres Poetiques,' Paris, 1579.^ At the end of 
Barnes's volume there also figure six dedicatory sonnets. In 
Sonnet xcv. Barnes pays a compliment to Sir Philip Sidney, 'the 
Arcadian shepherd, Astrophel,' but he did not draw so largely on 
Sidney's work as on that of Ronsard, Desportes, De Baif, and Du 
Bellay. Legal metaphors • abound in Barnes's poems, but amid 
many crudities he reaches a high level of beauty in Sonnet Ixvi., 
which runs : 

Ah, sweet Content ! where is thy mild abode ? 
Is it with shepherds, and light-hearted swains, 
Which sing upon the downs, and pipe abroad. 
Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains ? 

Ah, sweet Content ! where dost thou safely rest ? 
In Heaven, with Angels? which the praises sing 
Of Him that made, and rules at His behest, 
The minds and hearts of every living thing. 

Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harbour hold? 
Is it in churches, with religious men, 
Which please the gods with prayers manifold ; 
And in their studies meditate it then ? 

Whether thou dost in Heaven, or earth appear ; 

Be where thou wilt ! Thou wilt not harbour here ! * 

I Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 75-114. ^ Ibid., i. 165-316- 

' Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 

1608. 

« Dekker's well-known song, 'Oh, sweet content,' in his play of 'Patient Grisselde' 

(1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes. 



704 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

In August 1593 there appeared a posthumous collection of 
^ ,^ sixty-one sonnets by Thomas Watson, entitled 'The 
'Tears of Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained.' They are through- 
Fancie, Qut of the imitative type of his previously published 

'Centurie of Love.' Many of them sound the same 
note as Shakespeare's sonnets to the 'dark lady.' 

In September 1593 followed Giles Fletcher's 'Licia, or Poems 
of Love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his 
Fletcher's Lady.' This collection of fifty- three sonnets is dedi- 
' Licia,' Gated to the wife of Sir Richard MoUineux. Fletcher 

^593- makes no concealment that his sonnets are literary 

exercises. 'For this kind of poetry,' he tells the reader, 'I did it 
to try my humour ' ; and on the title-page he notes that the work 
was written 'to the imitation of the best Latin poets and others.' ^ 

The most notable contribution to the sonnet-literature of 1593 
was Thomas Lodge's 'Phillis Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, 
Lodge's Elegies, and Amorous Delights.' ^ Besides forty son- 

'Phillis,' nets, some of which exceed fourteen lines in length and 
^593- others are shorter, there are included three elegies and 

an ode. A large number of Lodge's sonnets are literally translated 
from Ronsard and Desportes, but Lodge also made free with the 
works of the Italian sonnetteers Petrarch, Ariosto, Sannazaro, 
Bembo and Lodovico Paschale. How servile Lodge could be 
may be learnt from a comparison of his Sonnet xxxvi. with Des- 
portes' sonnet from 'Les Amours de Diane,' livre il. sonnet iii. 

Thomas Lodge's Sonnet xxxvi. runs thus : 

If so I seek the shades, I presently do see 
The god of love forsake his bow and sit me by ; 
If that I think to write, his Muses pUant be ; 
If so I plain my grief, the wanton boy will cry. 

If I lament his pride, he doth increase my pain ; 
If tears my cheeks attaint, his cheeks are moist with moan ; 
If I disclose the wounds the which my heart hath slain. 
He takes his fascia off, and wipes them dry anon. 

If so I walk the woods, the woods are his delight ; 
If I myself torment, he bathes him in my blood; 
He will my soldier be if once I wend to fight, 
If seas delight, he steers my bark amidst the flood. 

In brief, the cruel god doth never from me go. 

But makes my lasting love eternal with my woe. 

Desportes wrote in 'Les Amours de Diane,' book 11. sonnet iii. : 

Si ie me sies a I'ombre, aussi soudainement 
Amour, laissant son arc, s'assiet et se repose : 

1 Elizabethan Sonnets, ii. 23-74. „ 

2 There is a convenient reprint of Lodge's Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles by 
Martha Foote Crow, 1896; see also Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 1-22. 



VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 705 

Si ie pense a des vers, ie le voy qu'il compose : 
Si ie plains mes douleurs, il se plaint hautement. 

Si ie me plains du mal, il accroist mon tourment : 
Si ie respan des pleurs, son visage il arrose : 
Si ie monstre la playe en ma poitrine enclose, 
II defait son bandeau I'essuyant doucement. 

Si ie vay par les bois, aux bois il m'accompagne : 
Si ie me suis cruel, dans mon sang il se bagne : 
Si ie vais a la guerre, il deuient mon soldart : 

Si ie passe la mer, il conduit ma nacelle : 

Bref, iamais rinhumain de moy ne se depart, 
Pour rendre mon amour et ma peine eternelle. 

Three new volumes in 1594, together with the reissue of Daniel's 
'Delia' and of Constable's 'Diana' (in a piratical miscellany of 
sonnets from many pens), prove the steady growth of Drayton's 
the sonnetteering vogue. Michael Drayton in June 'idea,' 
produced his 'Ideas Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains,' ^^^'^• 
containing fifty-one 'Amours' and a sonnet addressed to 'his 
ever kind Mecaenas, Anthony Cooke.' Drayton acknowledged 
his devotion to 'divine Sir Philip,' but by his choice of title, style, 
and phraseology, the English sonnetteer once more betrayed his 
indebtedness to French compeers. 'L'Idee' was the name of a 
collection of sonnets by Claude de Pontoux in 1579. Many 
additions were made by Drayton to the sonnets that he published 
in 1594, and many were subtracted before 1619, when there 
appeared the last edition that was prepared in Drayton's life- 
time. A comparison of the various editions (1594, 1599, 1605, 
and 1 61 9) shows that Drayton published a hundred sonnets, but 
the majority were apparently circulated by him in early life. 

William Percy, the 'dearest friend' of Barnabe Barnes, published 
in 1594, in emulation of Barnes, a collection of twenty 'Sonnets 
to the fairest Coelia.' ^ He explains, in an address pg^cy's 
to the reader, that out of courtesy he had lent the 'Ccelia,' 
sonnets to friends, who had secretly committed them ^^^'^• 
to the press. Making a virtue of necessity, he had accepted the 
situation, but begged the reader to treat them as ' toys and amorous 
devices.' 

A collection of forty sonnets or 'canzons,' as the anonjnnous 
author calls them, also appeared in 1594 with the title 'Zepheria.'^ 
In some prefatory verses addressed 'AUi veri figlioli 'Zepheria,' 
delle Muse' laudatory reference was made to the son- ^594- 
nets of Petrarch, Daniel, and Sidney. Several of the sonnets 
labour at conceits drawn from the technicalities of the law, and 
Sir John Davies parodied these efforts in the eighth of his 'gulling 
sonnets' beginning 'My case is this. I love Zepheria bright.' 

1 Elizabethan Sonnets, ii. 137-131. 2 /j. jj. 153-178. 

2 Z 



7o6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Four interes^ting ventures belong to 1595. In January, appended 
to Richard Barnfield's poem of 'Cynthia,' a panegyric on Queen 
Bamfieid's Elizabeth, was a series of twenty sonnets extolling the 
sonnets to personal charms of a young man in emulation of Virgil's 
^/qT™^'^^' Eclogue ii., in which the shepherd Corydon addressed 
the shepherd-boy Alexis.^ In Sonnet xx. the author 
expressed regret that the task of celebrating his young friend's 
praises had not fallen to the more capable hand of Spenser ('great 
Colin, chief of shepherds all') or Drayton ('gentle Rowland, 
my professed friend'). Barnfield at times imitated Shakespeare. 

Almost at the same date as Barnfield's 'Cynthia' made its 
appearance there was published the more notable collection by 
Spenser's Edmund Spenser of eighty-eight sonnets, which, in 
'Amoretti,' reference to their Italian origin, he entitled ' Amoretti.' - 
^^^^- Spenser had already translated many sonnets on phil- 

osophic topics of Petrarch and Joachim Du Bellay. Some of the 
'Amoretti' were doubtless addressed by Spenser in 1593 to the 
lady who became his wife a year later. But the sentiment was 
largely ideal, and, as he says in Sonnet Ixxxvii., he wrote, like 
Drayton, with his eyes fixed on 'Idsea.' Several of Spenser's 
sonnets are unacknowledged adaptations of Tasso or Desportes. 

An unidentified 'E. C, Esq.,' produced also in 1595, under 
the title of 'Emaricdulfe,' ^ a collection of forty sonnets, echoing 
'Emaric- English and French models. In the dedication to his 
duife,' 'two very good friends, John Zouch and Edward 

'^^^- Fitton Esquiers,' the author tells them that an ague 

confined him to his chamber, ' and to abandon idleness he com- 
pleted an idle work that he had already begun at the command 
and service of a fair dame.' 

To 1595 may best be referred the series of nine ' GuUinge sonnets' 
or parodies, which Sir John Davies wrote and circulated in manu- 
Sirjohn script, in order to put to shame what he regarded as 
Hfuiiin\ '^^^ bastard sonnets' in vogue. He addressed his 
Sonnets,' Collection to Sir Anthony Cooke, whom Drayton had 
rs9s- already celebrated as the 'Mecasnas' of his sonnetteer- 

ing efforts.'* Davies seems to have aimed at Shakespeare as well 
as at insignificant rhymers like the author of 'Zepheria.' ^ No. 
viii. of Davies's 'guUinge sonnets,' which ridicules the legal met- 
aphors of the sonnetteers, may be easily matched in the collections 
of Barnabe Barnes or of the author of 'Zepheria,' but Davies's 

* Reprinted in Arber's English Scholars' Library, 1882. 

2 It was licensed for the press on November 19, 1594. 

' Reprinted for the Roxburghe Club in A Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles 
Edmonds. 'Emaricdulfe' is an anagram of a lady's name, Marie Cufeld, alias Cufaud, 
alias Cowfold, of Cufaud Manor near Basingstoke.' Her mother, a daughter of Sir 
Geoffrey Pole, was maid of honour to Queen Mary (cf. Monthly Packet, 1884-5). She 
seems to have married one William Ward. 

^ Davies's Poems, ed. Grosart, i. 51-62. ^ gee p. 175, note. 



VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 707 

phraseology suggests that he also was glancing at Shakespeare's 
legal sonnets Ixxxvii. and cxxxiv. Davies's sonnet runs : 

My case is this. I love Zepheria bright, 

Of her I hold my heart by fealty : 

Which I discharge to her perpetually, 

Yet she thereof will never me acquit[e]. 

For, now supposing I withhold her right, 

She hath distrained my heart to satisfy 

The duty which I never did deny. 

And far away ifnpounds it with despite. 

I labour therefore justly to repleave [i.e. recover] 

My heart which she unjustly doth impound. 

But quick conceit which now is Love's high shreive 

Returns it as esloyned [i.e. absconded], not to be found. 

Then what the law affords — I only crave 

Her heart, for mine inwit her name to have. 

'R. L., gentleman,' probably Richard Linche, published in 1596 
thirty-nine sonnets under the title 'Diella.'^ The effort is thor- 
oughly conventional. In an obsequious address by the Linche's 
publisher, Henry Olney, to Anne, wife of Sir Henry 'Diella,' 
Glenham, Linche's sonnets are described as 'pas- ^^^^' 
sionate' and as 'conceived in the brain of a gallant gentleman.' 

To the same year belongs Bartholomew Griffin's 'Fidessa,' 
sixty-two sonnets inscribed to 'William Essex, Esq.' Griffin 
designates his sonnets as 'the first fruits of a young QrifBn's 
beginner.' He is a shameless plagiarist. Daniel is 'Fidessa,' 
his chief model, but he also imitated Sidney, Watson, ^^^^' 
Constable, and Drayton. Sonnet iii., beginning 'Venus and 
young Adonis sitting by her,' is almost identical with the fourth 
poem — • a sonnet beginning ' Sweet Cytherasa, sitting by a brook ' 
— in Jaggard's piratical miscellany, 'The Passionate Pilgrim,' 
which bore Shakespeare's name on the title-page.^ Thomas 
Jaggard doubtless borrowed the poem from Griffin. Campion, 
Three beautiful love-sonnets by Thomas Campion, ^^96. 
which are found in the Harleian MS. 6910, are there dated 1596.^ 

William Smith was the author of 'Chloris,' a third collection 
of sonnets appearing in 1596.^ The volume contains forty-eight 
sonnets of love of the ordinary type, with three adulat- y^rnuam 
ing Spenser ; of these, two open the volume and one smith's 
concludes it. Smith says that his sonnets were 'the [^^1°^^'^'' 
budding springs of his study.' In 1600 a license was 
issued by the Stationers' Company for the issue of 'Amours' 

' Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 297-320. 2 /j. jj. 261-296. 

' Cf. Brydges's Excerpta Tudoriana, 1814, i. 3S-7- One was printed with some altera- 
tions in Rosseter's Book of Ayres (i6io), and another in the Third Book of Ayres (1617 ?) ; 
see Campion's Works, ed. A. H. Bullen, pp. is~r6, 102. 

* Elizabetltan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 321-349. 



7o8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

by W. S. This no doubt refers to a second collection of sonnets 
by William Smith. The projected volume is not extant.^ 

In 1597 there came out a similar volume by Robert Tofte, 
entitled 'Laura, the Joys of a Traveller, or the Feast of Fancy.' 
„ , The book is divided into three parts, each consisting 

Tofte's of forty 'sonnets' in irregular metres. There is a 

'Laura,' prose dedication to Lucy, sister of Henry, ninth Earl 
of Northumberland. Tofte tells his patroness that 
most of his 'toys' 'were conceived in Italy.' As its name implies, 
his work is a pale reflection of Petrarch. A postscript by a friend 
— 'R. B.' — ^ complains that a publisher had intermingled with 
Tofte's genuine efforts 'more than thirty sonnets not his.' But 
the style is throughout so uniformly tame that it is not possible 
to distinguish the work of a second hand.^ 

To the same era belongs Sir William Alexander's 'Aurora,' 
a collection of a hundred and six sonnets, with a few songs and 
Sir William clegies interspersed on French patterns. Sir William 
Alexander's describes the work as 'the first fancies of his youth,' 
'Aurora.' ^^-^^ formally inscribes it to Agnes, Countess of Argyle. 
It was not published till 1604.' 

Sir Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, the intimate friend 
of Sir Philip Sidney, and Recorder of Stratford-on-Avon from 
Sir Fulke ^^°^ ^^^^ ^^^ death, was author of a like collection of 
Greviiie's sonuets Called ' Cselica.' The poems number a hundred 
' Caehca ' g^^^ nine, but few are in strict sonnet metre. Only a 
small proportion profess to be addressed to the poet's fictitious 
mistress, Caelica. Many celebrate the charms of another beauty 
named Myra, and others invoke Queen Elizabeth under her 
poetic name of Cynthia (cf. Sonnet xvii). There are also many 
addresses to Cupid and meditations on more or less metaphysical 
themes, but the tone is never very serious. Greville doubtless 
wrote the majority of his ' Sonnets ' during the period under survey, 
though they were not published until their author's works 
appeared in folio for the first time in 1633, five years after his 
death. 

1 See p. 66g and note. 

2 Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Lee, ii. 351-424. 

_ ' Practically to the same category as these_ collections of sonnets belong the volu- 
minous laments of lovers, in sLx, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict 
sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such are Willobie his 
Avisa, IS94; Alcilia: Philoparthen's Loving Folly, by J. C., i59S ; Arbor of Amorous 
Deuices, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton; Alba, the Months 
Minde of a Melancholy Lover, by Robert Tofte, 1598; Daiphantus, or the Passions of 
Love, by Anthony Scoloker, 1604; Breton's The Passionate Shepheard, or The Shep- 
heardes Loue: set downe in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia: with many excellent 
conceited poems and pleasant sonets fit for young heads to passe away idle houres, 1604 (none 
of the 'sonets' are in sonnet metre); and John Reynolds's Dolarnys Primersse . . . 
wherein is expressed the liiiely passions of Zeale and Loue, 1606. Though George Withers's 
similar productions — his exquisitely fanciful Fidelia (1617) and his Faire-Virtue, the 
Mistresse of Phil' Arete (1622) — were published at a later period, they were probably 
designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century. 



VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 709 

With Tofte's volume in 1597 the publication of collections of 
love-sonnets practically ceased. Only tAvo collections on a volu- 
minous scale seem to have been written in the early Estimate of 
years of the seventeenth century. About 1607 William number of 
Drummond of Hawthornden penned a series of sixty- iss^ifed°be^''^ 
eight interspersed with songs, madrigals, and sextains, tween 1591 
nearly all of which were translated or adapted from ^"'^ '597- 
modern Italian sonnetteers.^ About 1610 John Davies of Hereford 
published his ' Wittes Pilgrimage . . . through a world of Amorous 
Sonnets.' Of more than two hundred separate poems in this 
volume, only the hundred and four sonnets in the opening section 
make any claim to answer the description on the title-page, and the 
majority of those are metaphysical meditations on love which are 
not . addressed to any definite person. Some years later William 
Browne penned a sequence of fourteen love-sonnets entitled ' Cselia' 
and a few detached sonnets of the same type.^ The dat es of produc- 
tion of Drummond's, Davies's, and Browne's sonnets exclude them 
from the present field of view. Omitting them, we find that be- 
tween 1 591 and 1597 there had been printed nearly twelve hundred 
sonnets of the amorous kind. If to these we add Shakespeare's 
poems, and make allowance for others which, only circulating in 
manuscript, have not reached us, it is seen that more than two 
hundred love-sonnets were produced in each of the six years under 
survey. The literary energies of France and Italy pursued a like 
direction during nearly the whole of the century, but at no other 
period and in no other country did the love-sonnet dominate 
literature to a greater extent than in England between 1591 and 

1597- 

Of sonnets to patrons between 1591 and 1597, of which detached 
specimens may be found in nearly every published book of the 
period, the chief collections were : 

A long series of sonnets prefixed to 'Poetical Exercises of a 
Vacant Hour' by King James VI of Scotland, 1591 ; twenty- 
three sonnets in Gabriel Harvey's 'Four Letters and jj gg^nets 
certain Sonnets touching Robert Greene' (1592), to' patrons, 
including Edmund Spenser's fine sonnet of compli- 'sgi-?- 
ment addressed to Harvey ; a series of sonnets to noble patronesses 
by Constable circulated in manuscript about 1592 (first printed 
in 'Harleian Miscellany,' 1813, ix. 491) ; six adulatory sonnets 
appended by Barnabe Barnes to his ' Parthenophil' in May 1593; 
four sonnets to 'Sir Philip Sidney's soul,' prefixed to the first 
edition of Sidney's 'Apologie for Poetrie' (1595) ; seventeen son- 

1 They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author's death, in Poems by 
that famous wit, William Drummond, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward 
Phillips, Milton's nephew. The best modern edition is that of Prof. L. E. Kastner in 
1913. A useful edition by Mr. W. C. Ward appeared in the 'Muses' Library' (1S94). 

2 Cf. William Browne's Poems in 'Muses' Library' (1894), ii. 217 et seq. 



7IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

nets which were originally prefixed to the first edition of Spenser's 
'Faerie Queene,' bk. i.-iii., in 1590, and were reprinted in the 
edition of 1596;^ sixty sonnets to peers, peeresses, and ofiicers 
of state, appended to Henry Locke's (or Lok's) ' Ecclesiasticus ' 
(1597) ; forty sonnets by Joshua Sylvester a^ddressed to Henry IV 
of France 'upon the late miraculous peace in Fraunce' (1599); 
Sir John Davies's series of twenty-six octosyllabic sonnets, which 
he entitled 'Hymnes of Astraea,' all extravagantly eulogising 
Queen Elizabeth (1599). 

The collected sonnets on religion and philosophy that appeared 
in the period 1591-7 include sixteen 'Spirituall Sonnettes to the 
-,-.-, „ ^ honour of God and Hys Saynts,' written by Constable 

111. bonnets ,, i-i,ii- • i 

onphiloso- about 1 593, and circulated only m manuscript; these 
phyand were first printed from a manuscript in the Harleian 
reigion. collection (5993) by Thomas Park in 'Heliconia,' 1815, 
vol. II. In 1595 Barnabe Barnes published a 'Divine Centurie 
of Spirituall Sonnets,' and, in dedicating the collection to Toby 
Matthew, bishop of Durham, mentions that they were written a 
year before, while travelhng in France. They are closely modelled 
on the two series of 'Sonnets Spirituels' which the Abbe Jacques 
de Billy published in Paris in 1573 and 1578 respectively. A long 
series of ' Sonnets Spirituels ' written by Anne de Marquets, a sister 
of the Dominican Order, who died at Poissy in 1598, was first pub- 
lished in Paris in 1605. In 1594 George Chapman published ten 
sonnets in praise of philosophy, which he entitled 'A Coronet for 
his Mistress Philosophy.' In the opening poem he states that his 
aim was to dissuade poets from singing in sonnets 'Love's Sensual 
Empery.' In 1597 Henry Locke (or Lok) appended to his verse- 
rendering of Ecclesiastes ^ a collection of ' Sundrie Sonets of Chris- 
tian Passions, with other Affectionate Sonets of a Feeling Con- 
science.' Lok had in 1593 obtained a license to publish 'a hundred 
Sonnets on Meditation, Humiliation, and Prayer,' but that work 
is not extant. In the volume of 1597 his sonnets on religious or 
philosophical themes number no fewer than three hundred and 
twenty-eight.^ 

Thus in the total of sonnets published between 1591 and 1597 
must be included at least five hundred sonnets addressed to patrons, 
and as many on philosophy and religion. The aggregate far 
exceeds two thousand. 

1 Chapman imitated Spenser by appending fourteen like sonnets to his translation 
of Homer in 1610; they were increased in later issues to twenty-two. Very numerous 
sonnets to patrons were appended by John Davies of Hereford to his Microcosmos (r6o3) 
and to his Scotirge of Folly (1611). Divers sonnets, epistles, &c. addressed to patrons by 
Joshua Sylvester between 1590 and his death in 1618 were collected in the 1641 edition 
of his Du Bar las his divine weekes and workes. 

2 Remy Belleau in 1566 brought out a similar poetical version of the Book of Eccle- 
siastes entitled Vaniie. 

' There are forty-eight sonnets on the Trinity and similar topics appended to Davies's 
Wittes Pilgrimage (1610?). 



X 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE SONNET IN FRANCE, 

I 5 50-1600 

In the earlier years of the sixteenth century MeHn de Saint-Gelais 
(1487-1558) and Clement Marot (1496-1544) made a few scattered 
efforts at sonnetteering in France ; and Maurice Seve _ . 
laid down the lines of all sonnet-sequences on themes of (1524-1585) 
love in his dixains entitled 'Delie' (1544). But it was p^- J'^ 
Ronsard (1524-1585), in the second half of the century, 
who first gave the sonnet a pronounced vogue in France. The 
sonnet was handled with the utmost assiduity not only by Ron- 
sard, but by the literary comrades whom he gathered round him, 
and on whom he bestowed the title of 'La Pleiade.' The leading 
aim that united Ronsard and his friends was the reformation of 
the French language and literature on classical models. But 
they assimilated and naturalised in France not only much that 
was admirable in Latin and Greek poetry,^ but all that was best 
in the recent Italian literature.^ Although they were learned 
poets, Ronsard and the majority of his associates had a natural 
lyric vein, which gave their poetry the charms of freshness and 

1 Graphic illustrations of the attitude of Ronsard and his friends to a Greek poet 
like Anacreon appear in Anacreon et les Poemes anacreontiques, Texle grec avec les Tra^ 
duciions et Imitations des Poeles du XVIe siecle, par A. Delboulle (Havre, 1891). A trans- 
lation of Anacreon by Remy Belleau appeared in 1556. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's essay, 
'Anacreon au XVI" siecle,' in his Tableau de la Poesie francaise au XVIe siecle (1893), 
pp. 432-47. In the same connection Anlhologie ou Recueil des phis beaux Epigrammes 
Grecs, . . . mis en vers frangois sur la version Laiine, par Pierre Tamisier (Lyon, 1589, 
new edit. 1607), is of interest. 

2 Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with 
Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. 
The Italian poets whose sonnets, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England 
and France in the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell' Aquila (1466- 
1500), Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547), Cardinal Bembo 
(1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), Bernardo Tasso 
(1493-156S), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma (d. 1585), Torquato Tasso 
(1544-1595), Luigi Groto (./?. 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni 
Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi's Sloria delta Letleratura Italiana, 1770-1782 ; 
Dr. Garnett's History of Italian Literature, 1S97 ; Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, edit. 
1898, vols. iv. and vi, ; and Francesco Flamini, // Cinquecento, Milan, n.d.). The present 
writer's preface to FJizabethan Sonnets (2 vols. 1904), and the notes to Watson's Passionate 
Centurie of Love, published in 1582 (see p. 171 note), to Davison's Poetical RJiapsody 
(ed. Mr. A. H. Bullen, 1891), and to Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden (ed. W. C. 
Ward, 1894, and L. E. Kastner, 1913), give many illustrations of English sonnetteers' 
indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers 
of the sixteenth century. 

711 



712 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

spontaneity. The true members of 'La Pleiade,' according to 
Ronsard's own statement, were, besides himself, Joachim du 
Bellay (1524-1560) ; Estienne Jodelle (1532-1573) ; Remy Belleau 
(1528-1577) ; Jean Dinemandy, usually known as Daurat or Dorat 
(i 508-1 588), Ronsard's classical teacher in early life ; Jean-Antoine 
de Baif (1532-1589) ; and Pontus de Thyard (1521-1605). Others 
of Ronsard's literary allies are often loosely reckoned among the 
'Pleiade.' These writers include Jean de la Peruse (i 529-1 554). 
Olivier de Magny (1530-1559), Amadis Jamyn (i538?-i585), Jean 
Passerat (1534-1602), Philippe Desportes (1546-1606), Etienne 
Pasquier (1529-1615), Scevole de Sainte-Marthe (1536-1623), and 
Jean Bertaut (1552-1611). These subordinate members of the 
Desportes 'Pleiade' were no less devoted to sonnetteering than 
(1546-1606). the original members. Of those in this second rank, 
Desportes was most popular in France as weU as in England. 
Although many of Desportes's sonnets are graceful in thought 
and melodious in rhythm, most of them abound in overstrained 
conceits. Not only was Desportes a more slavish imitator of 
Petrarch than the members of the 'Pleiade,' but he encouraged 
numerous disciples to practise 'Petrarchism,' as the imitation of 
Petrarch was called, beyond healthful limits. Under the influence 
of Desportes the French sonnet became, during the latest years of 
the sixteenth century, little more than an empty and fantastic 
echo of the Italian. 

The following statistics will enable the reader to realise how 
closely the sonnetteering movement in France adumbrated that 

in England. The collective edition in 1 584 of the works 
collections ^^ Ronsard, the master of the 'Pleiade,' contains more 
of French than nine hundred separate sonnets arranged under such 
publfshed titles as 'Amours de Cassandre,' 'Amours de Marie/ 
between 'Amours pour Astree,' 'Amours pour Helene' ; besides 
1584^'^'^ 'Amours Divers' and 'Sonnets Divers,' complimentary 

addresses to friends and patrons. Du Bellay 's 'Olive,' 
a collection of love-sonnets, first published in 1549, reached a 
total of a hundred and fifteen. 'Les Regrets,' Du Bellay's son- 
nets on general topics, some of which Edmund Spenser first trans- 
lated into English, numbered in the edition of 1565 a hundred and 
eighty-three. Pontus de Thyard produced between 1549 and 1555 
three series of his 'Erreurs Amoureuses,' sonnets addressed to 
Pasithee. De Baif published two long series of sonnets, entitled 
respectively 'Les Amours de Meline' (1552) and 'Les Amours de 
Francine' (1555). Amadis Jamyn was responsible for 'Les 
Amours d'Oriane,' 'Les Amours de Calliree,' and 'Les Amours 
d'Artemis' (1575). Desportes' 'Premieres CEuvres' (1575), a 
very popular book in England, included more than three hundred 
sonnets — a hundred and fifty being addressed to Diane, eighty- 



THE SONNET IN FRANCE 713 

six to Hippolyte, and ninety-one to Cleonice. Belleau brought 
out a volume of 'Amours' in 1576. 

Among other collections of sonnets published by less known 
writers of the period, and arranged here according to date of first 
publication, were those of Guillaume des Autels, 
'Amoureux Repos' (1553); Olivier de Magny, ^ii°°tions 
'Amours, Soupirs,' &c. (1553, iSSq) ; Louise Labe, of French 
'CEuvres' (1555); Jacques Tahureau, 'Odes, Sonnets,' publfg^ed 
&c. (1554, 1574); Claude de Billet, 'Amalthee,' a between 
hundred and twenty-eight love sonnets (1561); Vau- j^o^ ^'^'^ 
quelin de la Fresnaye, ' Foresteries ' (1555 et annis 
seq.) ; Jacques Grevin, 'Olympe' (1561) ; Nicolas EUain, 'Son- 
nets' (1561) ; Scevole de Sainte-Marthe, 'CEuvres Frangaises' 
(1569, 1579) ; Etienne de la Boetie, 'CEuvres' (1572), and twenty- 
nine sonnets published with Montaigne's 'Essais' (1580); Jean 
et Jacques de la Taille, 'CEuvres' (1573) ; Jacques de Billy, 'Son- 
nets Spirituels' (first series 1573, second series 1578); Etienne 
Jodelle, 'CEuvres Poetiques' (1574) ; Claude de Pontoux, 'Sonnets 
de I'ldee' (1579) ; two hundred and eighty-eight regular sonnets 
with odes, chansons and other verse; Les Dames des Roches, 
'CEuvres' (1579, 1584); Pierre de Brach, 'Amours d'Aymee' 
{circa 1580); GUles Durant, 'Poesies' — -sonnets to Charlotte 
and Camille (1587, 1594); Jean Passerat, 'Vers . . . d'Amours' 
(1597); and Anne de Marquets, who died in 1588, 'Sonnets 
Spirituels' (1605).^ 

1 There are modem reprints of most of these books, but not of all. The writings of 
the seven original members of 'La Pleiade' are reprinted in La PUiade Francaise, edited 
by Marty-Laveaux, i6 vols., 1866-93. Ronsard's Amours, bk. i. ed. Vaganay (1910) has 
an admirable apparatus crilicus. The reprint of Ronsard's works, edited by Prosper 
Blanchemain, in La Bibliotheqzie Elzevirienne, 8 vols. 1867, is useful. The works of 
Remy Belleau are issued in the same series. Maurice Seve's Delie was reissued at Lyons 
in 1862. Pierre de Brach's poems were carefully edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris (2 vols., 
Paris, 1862). A complete edition of Desportes's works, edited by Alfred Michiels, ap- 
peared in 1863. Prosper Blanchemain edited a reissue of the works of Louise Labe in 
1875. The works of Jean de la Taille, of Amadis Jamyn, and of Guillaume des Autels 
are reprinted in Tresor des Vieux Poetes Fra>t(ais (1877 et annis seq.). See Sainte-Beuve's 
Tableau Historique el Critique de la Poesie Francaise du XVIe Siecle (Paris, 1893) ; Henry 
Francis Gary's Early French Poets (London, 1846) ; Becq de Fouquieres' CEuvres choisies 
des Poetes Frangais du XVIe Siicle contemporains awe Ronsard (1880), and the same editor's 
selections from De Ba'if , Du Bellay, and Ronsard ; Darmesteter et Hatzfeld's Le Seizicme 
Siecle en France — Tableau de la Litterature et de la Langue (6th edit., 1897); Petit de 
JuUeville's Historic de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise (1897, iii. 136-260), and the 
present writer's French Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1910), bk. iv. 



INDEX 



Abbey, Edwin Austin, 609 
Abbott, Dr. E. A., 644 
Actor-dramatists. See under Bark- 
stead, William; Field, Nathaniel; 
Haywood, Thomas; Jonson, Ben; 
Peele, George; Rowley, William; 
Shakespeare, William ; Wilson, 
Robert 
Actors: their licenses to act, 46 
and 47 w I ; their status, 48 and 
notes; their patrons, 52 seq.; com- 
panies of, 50 seq.; provincial tours, 
81 seq., 358 n see esp. 82 n ; Scottish 
tours, 83-4; foreign tours, 85-6: 
Shakespeare's view of, 88-9; privi- 
leges of the Lord Admiral's and 
Lord Chamberlain's companies of, 
337 and MI, 338; and the Privy 
Council, 337-39; strife between 
adult and boy actors, 340-49 {See 
also under Boy-actors) ; account 
of their misfortunes in Hamlet, 
341 and n 3, 342; their share in 
Jonson's Hterary controversies, 342- 
8; performances in University 
towns, 361 « 2 ; in Germany, 610 ; 
in Paris, 623. See also under Women- 
actors 
Actors: companies of. See wider 
Berkeley, Lord; Boy-actors; 

Chandos, Lord; Chapel Royal, 
Children of ; Derby, Earl of ; Eliza- 
beth, Queen; Essex, Earl of; 
Howard, Lord Charles of EiSngham, 
Lord High Admiral ; Hunsdon, Lord ; 
James I, King; Leicester, Earl 
of; Oxford, Earl of; Pembroke, 
Earl of; St. Paul's, children of; 
Stafford, Lord; Sussex, Earl of; 
Warwick, Earl of ; Worcester, Earl of 
Actors' Remonstrance: cited on money 
taken at theatres, 308 n ; on drama- 
tists' incomes, 315 « 
Adams, Maud, American actress, 609 
Addenbroke, John, sued by Shake- 
speare for debt, 322 and n i 
Addison, Joseph, on Shakespeare, 
S95, 618 



iEschylus, IT n 

Alabaster, William, his Roxana, 74^1, 
151 n 2 

Alcilia, 708 n 3- 

Alexander, Sir William, his Aurora, 
708 

All is true, alternative title of Henry 
VIII, 441 and n i 

Allde, John, printer, 679 n i 

Allen, Charles, on Shakespeare's legal 
knowledge, 43 n, 655 

Allen, Giles, 63 « i 

AUeyn, Edward, in the Lord Ad- 
miral's company of actors, 61 and 
n I ; pays fivepence for the pirated 
Sonnets. 160 w; acts before Queen 
Elizabeth at Richmond, 373 n 3, 
456 » 2 ; his bequests, 493 and n i ; 
his Dulwich property, 493; his 
manuscripts, 558 n, 646, 649 

All's Well that Ends Well: debt to 
Boccaccio, 98; sonnet form in, 
iSS, see esp. 233-5; probable date 
of composition, 233, 234; sources 
of plot, 234; probably identical 
with Love's Labour's Won, 234, 259; 
chief characters, 234; style, 234, 
23s; mentioned by Meres, 259; 
editions of, 554 seq.; passages 
cited, 44 n i, 186 n 2, 216 n 2 

Allot, Robert, 568 

Alvanley, seat of an Arden family, 
284 

America, editions of Shakespeare, 
printed and published in, 581 n; 
'Bankside' edition, 583 " i; 'Har- 
vard' edition, 584: 'Riverside' 
edition, 584; 'First Folio' edition, 
584; 'Renaissance' edition, 584, 

585 
Amner, Richard, 580 
'Amours', use of word in France, 

660 n, 712 seq. 
Amsterdam, English actors at, 85 

'Amyntas', complimentary title 01, 

151 n 2, 665 n I 
Anacreon, 711 w i 



71S 



7i6 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Anders, H. R. D., 644 

Andrewes, Lancelot, 495 n 2 

Andrewes, Robert, 457 

Angerianus, 148 « 2 

Anne, Queen, wife of James I (of 
England), 66; and the omissions 
from the quartos of Hamlet, 364 and 
11 I ; her patronage of actors, 96, 
376 and n i ; witnesses Love's 
Labour's Lost, 383 

Anti-Semitism in Tudor times, 135 n i 

Antoine, Andre, French actor, in 
Shakespearean roles, 624 

Antony and Cleopatra, account of, 
406-10 ; date of publication, 407 ; 
story derived from Plutarch, 98, 407- 
9; the theme in French tragedy, 
417 n i; Shakespeare's treatment 
of the story, 409 and 408 n i ; the 
metre and 'happy valiancy' of the 
style, 410 ; editions of, 554 seq. ; 
Dryden's adaptation in All for 
Love, 595 ; passages cited, 78, 
223 n 3, 576 

Apollonius of Tyre, ancient story of, 
402, 403 

Appian, Shakespeare's indebtedness to, 
333 

Apuleius, 425 n i 

Archer, Thomas, bookseller, 679 n i 

'Arden Shakespeare, The,' 584 

Arden family, 6, 282 seq. 

Arden, Agnes or Anne, 7 

Arden, Alice, 8 

Arden, Edward, high sheriff of War- 
wickshire (1575), 7 

Arden, Joan, 14 

Arden, Mary. See Shakespeare, Mary 

Arden, Robert, sheriff of Warwick- 
shire (1438), 7 

Arden, Robert, son of Thomas Arden, 
7 ; landowner at Snitterfield, 3, 7 ; 
his family, 7-8; death, and will, 7, 
282 seq. 

Arden, Thomas, 7 

Arden of Feversham, assigned to 
Shakespeare, 140; sources of, 140; 
Swinburne's view of, 140-1 

Aremberg, Count d', 382 n i 

Aretino, Pietro, 711 ra 2 

Argyle, Agnes, Countess of, 708 

Ariodante and Ginewa, Historie of, 
324 and n r 

Ariosto, 22, 42 n i, 92, 172 and n 2, 324 

Aristotle, quotation from, by Bacon 
and Shakespeare, 653 n 2 

Armenian translations of Shakespeare, 
632 



Armin, Robert, 375, 379 n 2, 382 n i, 
451 n I 

Arms, Coat of, John Shakespeare's ap- 
plication for, 2, 13 n, 281 seq. 

Arne, Dr., musician, 599, 607 

Arnold, Matthew, 587 n i 

Arundel, Thomas, first Lord Arundel 
of Wardour, 657 n 4 

As You Like It: Shakespeare's role of 
Adam in, 88; use of prose in, loi 
n 2; reference to Marlowe in, 136; 
account of, 325-7; adapted from 
Lodge's Rosalynde, 98, 325, 326; its 
pastoral character, 325; hints taken 
from Saviolo's Practise, 326; debt 
to Ariosto's Orlando, 326 n i ; ad- 
dition of three new characters, 327 ; 
publication of, 331, 332; alleged 
performance before King James I 
at Wilton, 378 n, 686 n; editions of, 
554 seq. ; passages cited, 20 n 2, 
30 n I, 78, 86 n 2, 136 

Asbies, Maiy Shakespeare's property 
at Wilmcote, 8; mortgaged to 
•Edmund Lambert, 14 and n 2, 
33, 236; Shakespeare's unsuccessful 
claim for its recovery, 289-90. 

Ascham, Roger, his use of the word 
'will,' 691 

Ashbee, E. W., his quarto facsimiles, 
SSo n I 

Aspinall, Mr., 291 n i 

Aspley, William, bookseller, 160, 
242 n I, 331, 553 seq., 568 

Astley, Hugh, stationer, 680 

Aston Cantlow, 6-8 

Aubrey, John, on Shakespeare, 501, 
521, 641, see also 5, 22, 25, 39, 275, 
276 n 2, 448, 484 n I, 689; on John 
Combe's epitaph, 471 and n 2, 
484 n I 

Augsburg, English actors at, 85 

'Auriol' miniature portrait of Shake- 
speare, 536 

Austria, English actors in, 85 

Autels, Guillaume des, 713 and n 

Awdley, Thomas, 321 

Ayrer, Jacob, his Comedia von der 
schonen Sidea, 427 and n 2, 428 

Ayscough, Samuel, 645 n 



Bacon, Anne, 459 and n i 

Bacon, Anthony, 654 n 1 

Bacon, Delia, 651 

Bacon, Sir Edmund, 457 n 2, 654 n 2 

Bacon, Francis, 490; alleged author- 



INDEX 



717 



ship of Shakespeare's plays, 651 
seq. ; his poetic incapacity, 654 

Bacon, Matthew of Holborn, 457, 458 

Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 405 n 2 

Bacon, Richard, 458 

Bacon, Thomas, 654 

Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, 651- 
S ; bibliography of, 652 « i 

Baddesley Chnton, Shakespeares at, 2 

Badger, George, 280 

Badsey, Thomas, 291 n i 

Bagley, Edward, 513 

Baif, Jean Antoine de, 183, 702, 703, 
712, 713 n 

Baker, G. P., 608, 645 

Bale, Bishop, his King Johan, 138 

Bales, Peter, 113 » 

Bandello, 22, 98, 108 n, no and n, 
141, 147, 324, 330 

Bankside, Southwark. See under 
'Globe,' 'Rose,' and 'Swan' theatres 

'Bankside' edition of Shakespeare, 
583 n I 

Barante, on Shakespeare, 624 

Barber or Barbor, Joan, 478 n 

Barber or Barbor, Thomas, 478 n 

Bardolph, William Phillipp, Lord, 286 

Baretti, Giuseppe, his appreciation 
of Shakespeare, 627 

Barker, Johii, 320 

Barker, Thomas, 280 

Barker, WUliam, 319 

Barkstead, William, actor and drama- 
tist, 97 n 

Barlichway, Shakespeares at, 2 

Barnard. See Bernard 

Barnay, Ludwig, German actor of 
Shakespearean roles, 617 

Barnes, Barnabe, his use of legal 
terminology, 43 « i, 703 ; resem- 
blance of the conceits in his sonnets 
to those in Shakespeare's, 190, 191 ; 
the probable rival of Shakespeare 
for Southampton's favour, 201-3 ; 
his sonnets to Southampton and 
Lady Bridget Manners, 200, 659 
n 2, 664; his sonnets on women's 
obduracy, 694 and « i, « 2, 695 « 3 ; 
his use of word 'will,' 696; 703, 706, 
709—10 

Barnes, William, 467 

Bamfield, Richard, his praise of Shake- 
speare's narrative poems, 150, 159, 
209 n ; adoration of Queen Elizabeth 
in his Cynthia, 207 and n, 227, 706; 
his contributions to the Passionate 
Pilgrim, 267 and n 2 ; his use of in- 
itials in 'dedications,' 675 



BELLEFOREST 

Barnstaple, players at, 82 and 83 n 

Barret, Ranelagh, his copy of the 
'Chandos' portrait, 533 

Barry, James, 608 

Barry, Lodowick (or Lording), share- 
holder in Whitefriars theatre, 303 

Barry, Mrs. Elizabeth, 533 

Bartholomew Fair, suppressed owing 
to the plague, 130 

Bartlett, John, 645 

Barton, Thomas Pennant, his collec- 
tion of Shakespeareana, 609 

Barton-on-the-Heath, identical with 
Burton Heath in the Taming of 
the Shrew, 236 

Basse, William, 497 ; his elegy on 
Shakespeare, 498-9 and n 

Bath, players at, 82, 83 n 

Bathurst, Charles, loi n i 

Baynes, Thomas Spencer, 645 

Beale, Francis, 668 

Beale, John, bookseller, 679 n i 

Bear Garden, Southwark, 274 n i 

Beaumont, Francis, residence in South- 
wark, 27s ; see also 455 n, 498- 
500; on 'things done at the Mer- 
maid,' 258; his tragicomedies in 
collaboration with John Fletcher, 
418 and n i ; collected works, 
552 n I ; Faithful Shepherdess, The, 
418; A King and no King, 418 and 
« I ; ' fair copies ' of Honest Man's 
Fortune, and Humorous Lieutenant, 
418 and n i, 558 n i; Philaster, 
677 ; Scornful Lady, 66 n 3 

Beaumont, Sir John, 668 

Becker, Ludwig, 538 

Bedford, Edward Russell, third Earl 
of, his marriage, 232, 659 

Bedford, Lucy, Countess of, 209 n i 

Beeching, Dean H. C, 162 n, 655 

Beeston, Christopher, actor, 53 n 2, 
451 n I, 641 

Beeston, William, 36; his view of 
Shakespeare's acting, 87 ; his ac- 
count of Shakespeare, 36, 276 n, 
641 

'Begetter,' in sense of procurer, 679, 
680 and n i 

Belinsky, Russian critic of Shake- 
speare, 629 

Bell inn, Gracechurch Street, 60 w 2 

Bellay. See Du Bellay 

Belleau, Remy, 710 n i, 711 n i, 
712 

Belleforest, Francois de, Shake- 
speare's indebtedness to Les His- 
toires Tragiques of, 18, 98, no n, 



7i8 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



324, 330; his version of the 'Ham- 
let' story, 353 

Bellott, Stephen, 277 n i, 517 

Bel Sauvage inn, Ludgate, 60 w 2 

Bembo, Pietro, epitaph on Raphael, 
497 n I. See also 172, 704, 711 
n 2 

Benda, J. W. O., his translation of 
Shakespeare, 614 

Bendish, Sir Thomas, 458-9 

Benedix, J. R., his opposition to the 
worship of Shakespeare in Ger- 
many, 615 

Benfield, Robert, 303 n, 306 n, 307 n 

Benger, Sir Thomas, master of the 
revels, 70 n 

Bensley, Robert, actor, 603 

Benson, F. R., his performances at 
Stratford, 541, 606 

Benson, John, printer of the Poems 
of 1640, . . . 544 and n 2 

Bentley, R., 570 

Bergerac, Cyrano de, 618 

Berkeley, Lord, visit of his company 
of actors to Stratford, 24 « 2 

Berkenhead, Sir John, directions for 
his burial, 484 n i 

Berlin, copy of First Folio at, 567 

Beriioz, Hector, 624 

Bernard or Barnard, Sir John, second 
husband of Shakespeare's grand- 
daughter, Elizabeth, 510-11; ac- 
count of, 511; his estate, 511 w 2 

Bernard, Lady. See under Hall, 
Elizabeth 

Berners, Lord, his translation of 
Huon of Bordeaux, 233 

Bernhardt, Mme. Sarah, as Lady 
Macbeth, 624 

Bertaut, Jean, 712 

Betterton, Thomas, actor, 45, 533, 
590, 593, 599, 600, 601, 642 

Betterton, Mrs., actress, in great 
Shakespearean roles, 601 

Beverley, miracles plays at, 91 n 

Bible, versions of the, 22; Shake- 
speare's use of the Genevan version, 
22 and 23 n i 

Bidford, Shakespeare's alleged drink- 
ing bouts at, 481 and n i ; Shake- 
speare's crabtree at, 481 n i 

Billet, Claude de, 713 

Billy, Abbe Jacques, de, 710 

Bingham, John, 495 

Birmingham, Shakespeare memorial 
library at, 541 

Birth of Merlin, 265 and n i 

Bishop, George, printer, 41 



Bishop, Sir Henry, 607 

Blackfriars, Shakespeare's property 
at, 456-9 

' Blackfriars ' theatre, 60 w 2 ; account 
of, 63-7 ; site of, 65 ?? i ; its struc- 
ture, 67 ; its demolition, 66 w i ; 
seating capacity, 73 ; Shakespeare's 
shares in, 306 ; its lessees, 306-7 ; 
shareholders, 307 n i ; takings at, 
308 and n; prices of admission 
to, 309; lawsuits relating to, ^10 seq. 
310 n; boy actors' activities at, 
338-40 and note; value of shares 
in, 312 n i; Collier's forged docu- 
ments relating to, 648-9; perform- 
ances at, Othello, 386, Two Noble 
Kinsmen, 437 

Blackness, Shakespeare's praise of, 
191-2 

Blades, William, 644 

Bleibtreu, Karl, 651 w 

Bloom, J. Harvey, 643 

Blount, Edward, publisher, 159 n, 
162, 270, 404, 408, 553-4, 568, 
666 n, 672, 677 

Blount, Sir Edward, 469 n 

Boaden, James, 682 n 

Boaden, John, on Shakespeare's por- 
traits, 535, 538 n 2 

Boaistuau de Launay, Pierre, 110 n 

Boar's Head Tavern, Eastcheap, 
60 n 2, 243 » I 

Boar's Head Tavern, Southwark, 
243, and n i 

Boas, F. S., 361 n, 646 

Boccaccio, Giovanni, his treatment 
of friendship, 215-7; Chaucer's 
indebtedness to, 369 and n i ; 
Shakespeare's indebtedness to, 22, 
98, 232, 421, 425 and n i 

Bodenham, John, 680, 681 

Bodenstedt, Friedrich von, German 
translator of Shakespeare, 614 

Bodleian Library, collection of quartos 
in, 551 ; copies of First Folio in, 
566 and n i 

Boetie, Etienne de la, 713 

Bohemian translations of Shakespeare, 
632 

Boiardo, Matteo, his comedy, II 
Timone, 400 

Boito, Arrigo, his libretti for Verdi's 
Shakespearean operas, 626 

Bompas, G. C, 655 

Bond, Sir E. A., 650 n 2 

Bonian, Richard, publisher, 366 

Booth, Barton, actor, 601 

Booth, Edwin, American actor, 609 



INDEX 



719 



Booth, Junius Brutus, American actor, 

609 
Booth, Lionel, reprint of First Folio, 

568 n I 
Borck, Baron Caspar Wilhelm von, 611 
Boswell, James, 514 «, 599 
Boswell, James, the younger, 581 
Bottger, A., German translator of 

Shakespeare, 614 
Bourchier, Arthur, 6o5 
Bowden, H. S., 644 
Boy-actors, companies of, formed of 

choristers of St. Paul's and the 

Chapel Royal, 50 ; take women's 

parts, 78-9; strife with adult 

actors, 340 seq. ; references in 

Hamlet to, 348-49 
Boydell, John, his scheme for pictorial 

illustration of Shakespeare's plays, 

608 
Boydell, Josiah, his engraving of the 

'Felton' portrait, 535 
Bracebridge, C. H., 644 
Brach, Pierre de, 170 and n, 702, 

713 and 11 
Brachygraphy ; see under Shorthand 
Bradley, A. C, 598, 64s 
Braines, Mr. W. W., on the site of 

'The Theatre,' 58 n 
Brandes, Georg, Danish critic, on 

Shakespeare, 627, 646 
Brandon, Samuel, his Tragicomedy of 

the Virtuous Octavia, 408 n 
Brathwaite, Richard, his account of 

John Combe's epitaph, 470 n. See 

also 668, 676 
Brend, Matthew, 301 
Brend, Nicholas, 301 and n i 
Brend, Thomas, 301 w i 
Bretchgirdle, John, vicar of Strat- 

ford-on-Avon, 8 » 2 
Breton, Nicholas, his homage to the 

Countess of Pembroke, 208 n i ; 

268 n I ; his use of the word 'will,' 

691 ; his poetry, 708 n 2 
Brewster, E., 570 
Bridgeman, C. O., 689 n i 
Briggs, W. Dinsmore, 557 n i 
Bright, James Heywood, 682 n 
Bright, Timothy, his system of short- 
hand, 113 w 
Bristol, players at, 82 and n, 130 
British Museum, collection of quartos 

in, SSI 
Broke, Arthur, his version of Romeo 

and Juliet, no and n, 580 
Brome, Richard, his fees for play- 
writing, 315 w 



Brooke, Ralph, 286 seq. and notes, 
565 n 

Brooks, Vincent, 534 

Brown, C. Armitage, 682 n 

Brown, Carleton, his Poems by Sir 
John Salusbury and Robert Chester, 
273 n I 

Brown, John, creditor to John Shake- 
speare, 14 

Browne, Mary, mother of the third 
Earl of Southampton, 656, 6s7 n 2 

Browne, Sir Thomas, on scandal of 
irregular exhumation, 484 n i 

Browne, William, 499 n; his Coelia, 
709 

Bruno, Giordano, 41 

Bryan, George, actor, 53 n 2 

Buc, Sir George, licenser of plays, 
113 n, 406 

Buckhurst, Lord. See under Sackville, 
Thomas 

Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 
661 

Buckingham, John ShefSeld, Duke 
of, 377 n I, S9S n 

Buckingham and Chandos, Richard 
Grenville, first Duke of, 533 

Bucknill, John C, 644 

Buddeus, Johann Franz, 611 

Bullen, A. H., sSs n i 

Bull inn, Bishopsgate, 60 « 2 

Bullock, George, his cast of Shake- 
speare's bust, S24 

Burbage, Cuthbert, brother of Richard 
Burbage, succeeds father James in 
management of 'The Theatre,' 62; 
erects Globe theatre, 63 ; his 
shares in the Globe 300 seq. ; his 
lease of the Globe site, 300-1 ; 
his purchase of property in Black- 
friars, 456 

Burbage, James, member of the 
Earl of Leicester's company of 
actors, 51 and » i ; built first 
theatre, 'The Theatre,' in London, 
SI ; joined Lord Chamberlain's 
company, 53 ; manager of ' The 
Theatre,' 46, 51, 55 seq. ; shares 
in management of the Curtain, 
S9; his death, 62, 6s; his litiga- 
tion concerning 'The Theatre,' 62 
n I ; purchases Blackfriars theatre, 
64 ; financial arrangements with 
investors in 'The Theatre,' 302 
« i; theatrical lawsuits, 310 n 

Burbage, Richard, son of James 
Burbage [q.v.], leading actor in 
Lord Chamberlain's company, S3~ 



720 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



4, 54 n I, 55 ; succeeds father in 
management of 'The Theatre,' 
62 ; erects Globe theatre, 63 ; 
inherits Blackfrairs theatre by 
father's will, 65 ; leases Blackfriars 
to Children of Chapel Royal, 65 
and n 2 ; recovers possession of 
Blackfriars, 66 and n 3 ; sole pro- 
prietor, 506 seq. ; acts at Court, 55, 87, 
88, 153 ; his impersonation of Rich- 
ard III, 124 and n 2, 452 ; residence 
in Shoreditch, 276 ; his fee for acting 
at Court, 299 n 2; shares in Globe 
theatre, 279 n, 300 seq. ; has articled 
pupils, 314; creates title part in 
Hamlet, Lear and Othello, 357, 452; 
later relations with Shakespeare, 
451 seq., and notes; executor of 
Phillip's will, 451 n i ; summoned 
for giving dramatic performances 
during Lent, 451, n 2; his device 
for the Earl of Rutland's impresa, 
454> 455 ^■n.d notes, 456 and n 2 ; 
his fee for the device, 456 ; his repute 
as a painter, 456 n 2 ; purchases 
land in Blackfriars, 456 and n i ; 
legatee under Shakespeare's will, 
490; reputed painter of the 
'Chandos' portrait ' of Shake- 
speare, 532 «; of the 'Felton' por- 
trait, 535. See also 375, 378, 379, 383 

Burbie, Cuthbert, publisher, 106 and 
11 2, 113 and n 1 

Burdett, Sir Francis, 562 « 

Burdett, Sir Robert, 562 n 

Burdett-Coutts, W. A., owner of al- 
leged portrait of Shakespeare, 532 «; 
owner of 'Lumley' portrait, 534; 
owner of First Folio, 566 

Burdett Coutts, Baroness, her copies 
of the First Folio, 562 and n 4, 567 

Burgersdijk, Dr. L. A. J., Dutch 
translator of Shakespeare, 627 

Burges, Sir James Bland, 536 

Burghley, Lord, 657, 659 

Burnaby, Charles, 595 n 1 

Burre, Walter, bookseller, 672 

Burton, Francis, bookseller, 678 

Burton, William, 666 n 

Busby, John, stationer, 249, 395 and n i 

Butler, Samuel, on the Sonnets, 162 w 

Butler, Bishop Samuel, his copy 
of First Folio, 562, 567 n i 

Butter, Nathaniel, publisher, 113 
n, 261; share in the 1608 quarto 
of Lear, 395, 396 n 2 

Byfield, Richard, vicar of Stratford-on- 
Avon, 8 M 2 



C. E., author of Emaricdulfe, 179 n 2, 
706 and n i 

CcBsar's Fall, a rival play to Shake- 
speare's Julius CcBsar, 336 

Calderon, 626 

Caliban, his character based on 
Elizabethan conception of aborigines, 
429, 430 and n i, n 2, 431 and n; 
and his god Setebos, 431; his dis- 
torted shape, 432 and n i,n 2 

'Cambridge' edition of Shakespeare, 
582, 583 

Cambridge, players at, 82, 83 n ; Ham- 
let acted at, 361 and n 2 

Camden, William, Clarenceux King 
of Arms, 284 and 283 n 2, 565 n; on 
'imprese,' 453 n; Remaines cited, i 
n I, 143 n I 

Campbell, Lord, on Shakespeare's 
legal knowledge, 43 n, 644 

Campion, Thomas, his opinion of 
Barnes's verse, 202 ; his sonnet 
to Lord Walden, 210, 211 ; his son- 
nets, 707 and n 3 

Canterbury, players at, 82 and n 

CapeU, Edward, 35 w 2 ; view of Edward 
III, 141 ; plants slip of Shakespeare's 
mulberry tree at Troston Hall, 289 
n; his copy of Chandos portrait, 
533 ; his collection of quartos, 
551; his notes to the Taming of the 
Shrew, 237, 364 ; his edition of Shake- 
speare, 580, 581 and K I ; his edi- 
torial fees, 575 n 2 ; his critical works 
on Shakespeare, 581, 596 

Carcano, Giulio, Italian translator of 
Shakespeare, 625 

Cardenio, the lost play of, 263, 435-7 ; 
acted at court, 449 

Carew, Sir George, 15 « 2; his monu- 
ment, 523 and n i 

Carew, Richard, 143 n 

Carleton, Dudley, 66 n 

Caroline, Queen, 79 » i 

Carter, The Rev. Thomas, 13 n, 
23 n 2, 644 

Case, Prof. R. H., 584 

Cassel, English actors at, 85 

Castle, WiUiam, 46 and n 2 

Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 
influence of Shakespeare on, 628 
andw 2 

Catullus, Shakespeare compared with, 
143 n I 

Cawood, Gabriel, publisher, 159 « 

Caxton, William, his Recuyell of the 
historyes of Troy and the story of 
Troilus and Cressida, 370 



INDEX 



721 



' Caxton Shakespeare, The,' 585 

Cecil, Sir Robert, 380 n 2, 383 n i, 660, 
661, 662 

Censorship of plays. See esp. 127-9 

Cervantes, his Don Quixote, founda- 
tion of lost play of Cardenio, 436 

Chalmers, George, 71 « 

Chamberlain, John, 228 

Chambers, E. K., on court perform- 
ances. See especially 70 « 

Chandos, Lord, visit of his com- 
pany of actors to Stratford, 24 ?i 2 

Chandos, John Brydges, third duke 
of, owner of 'Chandos' portrait of 
Shakespeare, 533 

'Chandos' portrait of Shakespeare, 
532-4; copies of, 533 ; engravings of , 

533-4 , . . 

Chantrey, Sir Francis, his view of 
Shakespeare's bust, 525 re i 

Chapel Lane, Stratford-on-Avon, 
Shalifspeare's property in, 318 

Chapel Royal, Children of the, 50; 
perform at Blackfriars, 65 seg. ; 
rechristened Children of the 
Queen's Revels, 66; their per- 
formances and dissolution, 66 re 3 ; 
share in strife with adult actors, 
340 5eg.; cf. 417 

Chapman, George, his Duke of Byron, 
103 re, 673 re 3 ; An Humorous Day's 
Mirth cited, 103 n ; his Blind Beggar 
of Alexandria, 104 re ; his share in 
The Two Italian Gentlemefi, 107 n i ; 
falls under ban of censor, 128; 
finishes Marlowe's uncompleted Hero 
and Leander, 143 re ; his censure of 
sonnetteering, 174; his alleged 
rivalry with Shakespeare for South- 
ampton's favour, 203, 204, and re i ; 
and The Phoenix and the Turtle, 270; 
and the boy-actors, 340; his trans- 
lation of Homer's Iliad, 370; his 
Gentleman Usher, a tragicomedy, 
417. See also 374, 668, 673 re, 710 
and n i. 

Charlecote, Shakespeare's poaching 
adventure at, 34 seq. 

Charles I, his copy of the Second Folio 
at Windsor, 568 ; his study of Shake- 
speare's plays, sgo 

Charles II, his copy of the Second 
Folio at British Museum, 568 ; 
Shakespeare's plays performed by 
his acting company, 592 re i 

Charlewood, John, printer, 132 re 3 

Chateaubriand, and the Shakespear- 
ean controversy in France, 621 

3A 



Chatelain, Chevalier de, 622 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, his story of Lucrece, 
14s, 147 ; source of his Knight's Tale, 
216; hints in his Knight's Tale 
for Midsummer Night's Dream, 232 ; 
the plot of Troilus and Cressida 
taken from his Troylus and Criseyde, 
369 and n i ; Cleopatra in his Legend 
of Good Women, 407 ; plot of Two 
Noble Kinsmen drawn from his 
Knight's Tale, 438; burial at West- 
minster Abbey, 49S-9, 502 

Chelmsford, players at, 82, 83 re, 130 

Chenier, Marie- Joseph, and the Shake- 
spearean controversy in France, 
621 

Chester, players at, 82, 83 re, 130; 
miracle plays at, 91 re 

Chester, Robert, his Love's Martyr, 
270-3, 273 re I 

Chesterfield, Lord, 79 re i 

Chettle, Henry, publisher, descrip- 
tion of Shakespeare's acting, 87 ; 
his apology for Robert Greene's 
attack on Shakespeare, 118, 153, 
500; his panegyric on Queen Eliza- 
beth, 373-4; share in pre-Shake- 
spearean drama on Troilus and Cres- 
sida, 365-6 and re i ; and plays on 
Cardinal Wolsey, 440 re i ; his 
Patient Grissell, 546 

Chetwynde, Philip, publisher of Third 
Folio, 569 and n 1 

Chiswell, R., 570 and re 

Chorus, use of the, in Romeo and 
Juliet, 2 Henry IV and Henry V, 
251-2 ; in Pericles, 403 ; cf. 409, 413 

Chronicle plays, 94 

Churchyard, Thomas, 104 re, 151 re 2; 
calls Barnes 'Petrarch's Scholar,' 202 

Cibber, CoUey, 595 re i, 601 

Gibber, Mrs., 602 

Cibber, Theophilus, 45 and n 

Cicero, 16 

Cinthio, Giraldi, his Hecatommithi, 
Shakespeare's indebtedness to, 18, 
98, 108 re; 330, 387, 388 re I, re 2, 407 
re 2 ; his Epitia, 389 

Clare Market, theatre in, 78-9 

Clarendon, Lord, owner of portrait of 
Shakespeare, 531 

Clark, The Rev. Andrew, 6 re, 276 n 2 

Clark, J., his Spanish translation of 
Shakespeare, 626 

Clark, W. G., 582, 585 n 

Clarke, F. W., 585 re 

Clarke, Helen, 584 

Clarke, Thomas, 51 re i 



722 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Clayton, John, sued by a William 
Shakespeare for debt, 321 

Clement, Nicolas, criticism of Shake- 
speare by, 618 

Clements, H. C, 528-30 

Clifford Chambers, seat of Sir Henry 
Rainsford [q.v.], 15, 466 and n i 

Clift, William, 537 

Clink, Liberty of the, Southwark, 274-5 

Clive, Mrs., 602 

Clopton, Edward, 513 and n 2 

Clopton, Sir Hugh, builds New Place, 
288, 513-14 

Clopton, Sir John, 513 

Clopton, Lady, 513 

Cobham, Henry Brooke, eighth Lord, 
242, 337 

Cochran, A. W., 566 

Cockpit theatre, Drury Lane, 60 n 2; 
lawsuit relating to, 311 n, 315 n 

Cokain, Sir Aston, lines on Shake- 
speare and Wincot ale by, 237, 238, 
598 » 

Coke, Sir Edward, lord chief justice, 
denounces William Combe's enclo- 
sure of land, 477 and n i, 479 

Coleridge, S. T., on the style of An- 
tony and Cleopatra, 410; on the 
Two Noble Kinsmen, 438, 439; and 
Shakespearean criticism, 597 and n 
I, 645; his view of Kean's acting, 
603 

'College, The, ' Stratford-on-Avon, 288, 
319. See also under Combe, Thoma.s 

Collier, John Payne, 62 n ; his forged 
emendations in the Perkins Second 
Folio, 568 and n i ; includes Muce- 
dorus in his edition of Shakespeare, 
584 n I, 597, 59j8; his works on 
Shakespeare, 642 ; his Shakespearean 
forgeries, 647-50, 648 n i 

Collins, Francis, drafts Shakespeare's 
will, 479; his relations with the 
Combes, 480; legatee under John 
Combe's will, 480 and n i ; suc- 
ceeds Thomas Greene as town 
clerk of Stratford, 482 ; his will, 
482 n I ; overseer of and legatee 
under Shakespeare's will, 482, 488- 
90 

Collins, John, 580 

Collins, John Churton, 645 

ColUns, Simon, repairs the Stratford 
monument, 525 

Colonna, Guido della, his Historia 
Trojana, 370-71 

Colonna, Vittoria, 209 n 

Colte, Sir Henry, 685 n 



Colvin, Sir Sidney, on the 'Flower' 
portrait, 529 

Combe, George, brother of Thomas 
Combe of 'The College,' 468 and n 

Combe, John, of Alvechurch, 488 n 

Combe, John, brother of Thomas 
Combe of 'The College,' 37 n, 
317-19; wealthy resident of Strat- 
ford, 317, 322 n I, 468; sells land 
to Shakespeare, 318, 319, 460, 
467 ; a local money-lender, 468 seq. ; 
a bachelor, 468 n i ; his substantial 
property in Warwickshire, 468; 
his will, 468 and n 2 ; legacy to 
Shakespeare, 469 ; other bequests, 
469 and n; his tomb, 470; his 
epitaph, 470 seq. and notes 

Combe, Mary, wife of Thomas Combe 
of 'The College,' 468 n 

Combe, Thomas the elder, nephew 
of WilUam Combe of Warwick, 
37 n, 318 n, 463 n 2; purchases 
'The College' at Stratford, 288, 
467 seq. ; friend of Sir Henry Rains- 
ford, 467 ; his death, burial and 
will, 318 w, 468 n; bequest of his 
'best bed,' 486 w i ; cf. 480 

Combe, Thomas the younger, son 
of Thomas Combe of 'The College,' 
468 ; executor of uncle John Combe's 
will, 468 n 2 ; succeeds to uncle's 
property, 472 ; joins brother William 
[q.v.\ in attempt to enclose common 
lands at Stratford, 473 seq., 478 n; 
receives Shakespeare's sword as 
legacy, 488 and n; his will, 488 n 

Combe, William, of Alvechurch, legatee 
of Thomas Combe the younger, 488 n 

Combe, WiUiam the elder, of War- 
wick, 317-19; owns much property 
in Warwick, 317 ; account of, 318 n; 
sells land to Shakespeare, 317, 319, 
460 n; cf. 467, 468 

Combe, William the younger, son of 
Thomas Combe of 'The College,' 
37 n, 318 n, 468; succeeds to 
father's property, 472 ; account of, 
472 ; joins brother Thomas in at- 
tempt to enclose common lands 
at Stratford, 473; comes to terms 
with Shakespeare, 475; his stub- 
bornness, 477; his defeat, 479 and 
n; his harsh treatment of a debtor, 
478 7i; his death and burial, 479 n; 
lessee of some of Shakespeare's 
property, 491 

Combes, The, account of, 466 seq. 

Comedy of Errors, The: acted in 



INDEX 



723 



Gray's Inn Hall, 71, 139 and n i; 
at Court, 89, 383 ; publication of, 
loS; contemporary allusions, 108; 
sources of, 108; debt to Plautus, 
108-9; mentioned by Meres, 258; 
editions, see 554 seq. 

Condell, Henry, actor, member of 
the Lord Chamberlain's company 
and lifelong friend of Shakespeare, 
53 n 2, 56, 37S, 37Q n 2, 282 n; 
residence in Aldermanbury, 276; 
acquires share in Globe theatre, 
304, 305 n; in Blackfriars theatre, 
306; later relations with Shake- 
speare, 451 seq.; legatee under 
Shakespeare's will, 490; his be- 
quests, 492-3 ; his share in pub- 
lication of First Folio, 552 seq. 

Constable, Henry, publication of 
his 'Diana,' 158 n i, 702, 705; 
derives name 'Diana' from 
Desportes, 173, 702; Shakespeare's 
debt to, 178, 183 and n i, 184. 
See also 707, 710 

Constantinovitch, the Grand Duke 
Constantine, his translation of 
Hamlet, 629 and n 

Contention, The First Part of the, 119 
seq. See under Henry VI (pt. i.) 

Conti, Antonio, 624 

Contile, Luca, his work on 'Im- 
prese,' 453 n 

Cook, Alexander, 451 k i 

Cooke, Sir Anthony, friend of Sir 
John Davies, 174, 705, 706 

Cooke, George Frederick, actor, 603 

Cooke, James, 508 and n 

Cooper, Robert, 535 

Cope, Sir Walter, 382-3, 383 n i 

'Copy' of plays, private transcripts, 
558 and n 

Corbet, Richard, 124 « 2 

Coriolanus, 410-14; date of com- 
position and of publication, 410, 
411 71 i; treatment of the theme 
by French dramatists, 41 1 and n i ; 
debt to North's Plutarch, 98, 411 
and n 2 ; Shakespeare's present- 
ment of the characters, 412-13; 
the politics of the play, 413-14; 
editions of, see 554 seq. ; Tate's 
revision of, 595 ; Dennis's version 
of. 595 w I ; passages cited, 80 « i, 
410 n 2, 576 and n 

Coryat, Thomas, his travels on Con- 
tinent, 38 n 2, 673 

Costume in Elizabethan theatres, 
77-8, 308 n 



CYMBELINE 

Cotes, Thomas, printer of Second 
Folio, 568 

Cotswolds, the, Shakespeare's allu- 
sions to, 240 and 241 n i 

Cotton, John, 15 

Court, dramatic performances at, 
47, SI and n 2, S5, 67 seq. ; theatrical 
season at, 68 ; scenery and cos- 
tumes, 69-70; official organisation 
and expenses of, 70 « 2 ; documents 
relating to, 70 n 1; Shakespeare's 
company at, 87, 139, 383 n 2; 
records of, 87 » 2 ; plays acted, 
89, 106, 108, 153, 327, 372-3, 377, 
378, 383 seq., 385-6, 397, 404 n 1, 
420, 423, 432-3, 436, 442, 449 and n; 
fees from, 313, 384; Lyly's comedies 
at, 327 ; last performances before 
Queen Elizabeth, 372-3 

Court, Thomas, 10 

Courthope, W. J., 645 

Cousins, Samuel, 534 

Covell, William, his praise of Liicrece, 

■ ISO 

Coventry, players at, 82, 83 n ; miracle 
plays at, 91 n 

Cowden Clarke, Mrs., 64s 

Cowley, Richard, actor, 53 n 2; 
375, 379 n 2, 382 n i, 451 n i; 
creator of Verges in Muck Ado, 
286, 32s 

Cowling, G. H., 644 

Craig, W. J., 584, 58s n 

Crane, Walter, 608 

Crawford, Earl of, his copy of the 
First Folio, 566 

Creede, Thomas, printer, 113 n 1, 119, 
I2S n I, 249, 250; fraudulently 
ascribes plays to- Shakespeare, 260-1 

Cromwell, Historic of Thomas, Lord, 261 

'Crosskeys' Inn, Gracechurch Street, 
60 and n 2, 61, 81 n 

Crowne, John, 595 

Cushman, Charlotte, American actress, 
609 

Cufeld or Cowfold, Marie, 706 n 3 

Cunliffe, R. J., 64s 

Cunningham, Peter, 71 n, 649, 650 n 

Curie, Mr., 452 w 

'Curtain' theatre, Shoreditch, 59 and 
n, 60 n I, n 2, 61, 338, 380 w i ; 
performance of Every Man in His 
Humour at, 88 ; shares in, 302 n i ; 
takings at, 308 n; order for its 
demolition, 338 

Cust, Lionel, on Shakespeare's por- 
traits, 523 n, 528, 529, 530 n 2 

Cymbeline: prose in, 102 n, 418-20; 



724 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



position of, in First Folio, 419; 
first performance of, 419-20, 421- 
23; sources, 98, 421, 422; construc- 
tion and characterisation, 422-3 ; in- 
troduction of Calvinistic terms, 
422 and n i; comparison with As 
You Like It, 422 ; editions of, 
554 seq. ; Durfey's revision, 597 ; 
passage cited, 422 w i 

'Cynthia,' name applied by poets to 
Queen Elizabeth, 207 and n, 706 

Czartoryski, Princess Isabella, her 
worship of Shakespeare, 630 n 3 



Daborne, Robert, playwright, fee 
for writing plays, 314 w 3 

Daly, Augustin, his productions of 
Shakespeare's plays, 609 

Daniel, George, of Beswick, 243 

Daniel, George, his copies of Shake- 
spearean quartos, 551 n i; his 
copy of First Folio, 567 ; of Second 
Folio, 569 

Daniel, Samuel, his Complainte of 
Rosamond, 112, 148 and n 1; allu- 
sion to by Spenser, 151 n 2, 701; 
publication of his sonnets, 158 n; 
his sonnet on 'sleep,' 170; derives 
name 'Delia' from Maurice Seve, 
173; Shakespeare's debt to, 178; 
on the immortalising power of verse, 
188; his prefatory sonnet to 'Delia,' 
199; celebrates Southampton's re- 
lease from prison, 228, 667 ; his 
tragedy of Cleopatra, 408 n; his 
work on 'imprese,' 453 n; indebted- 
ness to French sonnetteers, 701-2. 
See also 374, 700, 705, 707 

Dante, 145; the dedication of his 
Divina Commedia, 675 n 2 

Danter, John, 112 and n 3, 132 

'Dark Lady, The,' of Shakespeare's 
sonnets, 194-5 

Daurat. See Dorat 

Davenant, John, of Oxford, father of 
Sir William D'Avenant, 39, 449; 
his wife, 449; his children, 450 
and n 

Davenant, Robert, 450 

D'Avenant, Sir WilHam, Shakespeare's 
godson, 39, 45-6; story of South- 
ampton's gift to Shakespeare, 197 ; 
owner of letter of James I to Shake- 
speare, 377; relations with Shake- 
speare, 450 and n ; owner of ' Chan- 
dos' portrait, 533; his admiration 



DENNIS 

of Shakespeare, 588, 591 and n 3 ; 
director of the Duke's {i.e. the Duke 
of York's) company of actors, 537, 
592 n ; as adapter of Shakespeare, 
593, 594 

Davenport, John, vicar of Stratford, 
524 

Davenport, Robert, 263 

Davies, John, of Hereford, 88, 144 n i, 
667, 668 and n i, 709, 710 n 

Davies, Sir John, 45 ; his ' gulling 
sonnets' a satire on conventional 
sonnetteering, 175, 198 n i, 706; 
adoration of Queen Elizabeth, 
207-8 n; celebrates Southampton's 
release in verse, 228; his sonnets 
entitled Amours, 669 n; his No see 
Teipsum, 696; his liymnes of 
Astrcea, 710 

Davies, Richard, vicar of Sapperton, 
his account of Shakespeare's poach- 
ing adventure and prosecution by 
Sir Thomas Lucy, 34-6; of Shake- 
speare's dying a papist, 485 and n; 
his notes on Shakespeare, 641-2 

Davison, Francis, his translation of 
Petrarch's sonnets, 171 n; dedica- 
tion of his Poetical Rhapsody to the 
Earl of Pembroke, 688 

Davis, C. K., 644 

Dawes, Robert, actor, 303 n 

Dedications, 669-71, 674-81; use of 
initials in Elizabethan and Jacobean, 
674, 675 n 

Dekker, Thomas, his Guls Hornbook 
cited, 46 w I, 73 ■» 2; his additions 
to Oldcastle, 244; his portrait 
of Ben Jonson in Satiromastix, 
256 n I ; reference in plays to 
theatrical shares, 303 n and n 2 ; 
his quarrel with Ben Jonson, 345 
seq. ; his allusion to the old play of 
Hamlet, 357 and notes ; revises a pre- 
Shakespearean drama on Troilus 
and Cressida, 366 and n i ; descrip- 
tion of James I's progress through 
London, 379. See also 501 n, 546 

De la Motte, Philip, 11 n 

Delius, Nikolaus, his edition of Shake- 
speare, 582-5 ; his study of Shake- 
speare's metre, 615 

Deloney, Thomas, 268 n 

Demblon, C., 651 w 

Denmark, English actors in, 84, 
85 w 2 ; Lord Leicester's company of 
players in, 85 w 2 ; translations of 
Shakespeare in, 627 

Dennis, John, on the Merry Wives 



INDEX 



725 



0/ Windsor, 246, 247 and n i ; his 
tribute to Shakespeare, sgs ; his 
adaptation of Coriolanus, 595 n i 

De Quincey, Thomas, 43S 

Derby, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord 
Strange, fifth Earl of, his company 
of actors, 52 ; merged in Lord 
Chamberlain's company, 52-3, 61 ; 
visit of company to Stratford, 24 n 
2; performances by, 56, 115, 131, 
266; referred to as 'Amyntas' by 
Spenser, 665 n i 

Derby, William Stanley, sixth Earl of 
his company of actors, 52 w i ; a 
playwright, 52 n i, 232 and n i 

Desportes, Philippe, his sonnet on 
'Sleep,' 170; plagiarised by English 
sonnetteers, 172 ; imitated by Shake- 
speare, 178, 183. See also 701-2, 712 

Dethick, William, 282 and n 1, 287 
and 11 I 

Deutsche Shakespeare-GeseUschaft, 
618, 64s 

Devonshire, Charles Blount, Earl of, 
380 n 2 

Devonshire, William Cavendish, sixth 
Duke of, owner of Garrick club bust 
of Shakespeare, 537 ; his collection 
of quartos, 551 ; his copy of First 
Folio, 566 ; facsimile reprint, 568 n i 

Devrient, Otto, 617 

Devrient, Eduard, 617 

Devrient, Gustav Emil, 617 

Devrient, Ludwig, 617 

De Witt, John, his drawing of interior 
of 'Swan' theatre, 74 w i 

Dibdin, Charles, his verses on Anne 
Hathaway, 26 « i 

Diderot, his opposition to Voltaire's 
strictures on Shakespeare, 620 

Digges, Leonard, on Shakespeare's 
monument, 493, 497 ; his tributes 
to Shakespeare, 352 n i, 544, 556, 
589 and n 2 

Dighton, Job, 512 and n 3 

Disraeli, Isaac, 646 

Dixon, Thomas, 292 n 

Dobbie, Sir James, 650 

Dobyns, Robert, his account of John 
Combe's epitaph, 471 » 3 ; of in- 
scription on Shakespeare's grave, 
484 n 2 

Dodd, William, his Beauties of Shake- 
speare, 596 

Dolce, Lodovico, 92 

Doncaster, Shakespeares at, i 

Donne, John, his addresses to the 
Countess of Bedford, 209 n ; his anec- 



DROESHOUT 

dote about Shakespeare and Jonson, 
256, 257; his MS. of Basse's elegy 
on Shakespeare, 499 n 

Donnelly, Ignatius, 652 

Dorat, Daurat orDinemandy, Jean, 712 

Dorell, Hadrian, 221 

Dormer, Marie, 458 

Dormer, Robert, 458 

Douce, Francis, 644 

Dover, players at, 82, 83 n 

Dowdall, John, his notes on Shake- 
speare, 25 n 2, 46 n 2, 641 

Dowden, Edward, 161 w 2, 584, 597, 5go 
n I, 69s n 2, 696 «, 698 n; his work 
on Shakespeare, 643 n, 645 

Drake, Nathan, 643 

Drama, pre-Elizabethan ; miracles, 
mysteries, moralities and interludes, 
90; Elizabethan, 91; its debt to 
classical models, 91 seq. ; Italian 
influence, 92 ; romantic drama, 92 ; 
amorphous developments, 93 ; Sir 
Philip Sidney's criticism of, 93 ; 
'Chronicle plays,' 94; university 
drama, 94 ; developments by Lyly, 
Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Marlowe, 
94-5. See also under Tragicomedy 

Drayton, Michael, his knowledge of 
Mantuanus and Virgil, 16 n, his 
lyric verse, 95 ; shareholder in White- 
friars theatre, 97 n, 303 ; his praise 
of Lucrece, 150; his invocations to 
Cupid, 166 11 I ; plagiarisms in his 
sonnets, 172 and n; 173 and n i; 
on insincerity of sonnetteers, 174; 
Shakespeare's debt to, 184; on the 
immortalising power of verse, 188; 
identified by some as the ' rival poet ' 
with Shakespeare for Southampton's 
favour, 204; part author of play of 
Oldcastle, 244; supposed allusion in 
his Barons' Wars to Antony's elegy 
on Brutus, 332 n 2, 336; his rela- 
tions with Sir Henry and Lady Rains- 
ford, 466 and m; patient of Dr. 
John Hall, 466, 505 n ; his intimacy 
with Shakespeare, 480; relations 
with Thomas Russell, 490; burial 
in Westminster Abbey, 500; his 
Idea, 70s ; his praise of Sidney, 705. 
See also 374, 379, 676, 699 n 2, 717. 

Drew, John, American actor, 609 

Droeshout, Martin, his engraved 
portrait of Shakespeare, 526 seq.; 
Jonson's tribute, 526; description 
of, 526-529; source of, 528; its 
relation to the 'Flower' portrait, 
529. See also 544, 55s 



726 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



DRUMMOND 

Drummond, William, of Hawthomden, 
his translations of Petrarch's sonnets, 
171 n; Italian and French origin of 
many of his love-sonnets, 172, 179 
n I, 193 n; his work on 'imprese,' 
453 n. See also 472 n, 709 and n 

Dryden, John, his criticism of Mercu- 
tio, III and n 2 ; his copy of the 
Chandos portrait, 533 ; his criticism 
of Shakespeare, 571, 591 and n 3 ; 
as adapter of Shakespeare, 593, 
594; his All for Love, 595 

Du Bellay, Joachim, Spenser's transla- 
tions of some of his sonnets, 170; 
anticipates Drayton in name 'Idee,' 
173 n s', on the immortality of 
verse, 187 n. See also 701, 703, 
706, 712, 713 n 

Duds, Jean-Franfois, French translator 
of Shakespeare, 620, 623 

Duffett, Thomas, 594 n s 

Dugdale, Gilbert, 376 n 1 

Dugdale, Sir WiUiam, his transcript 
of inscription over Shakespeare's 
grave, 484 n 2 ; his sketch of Shake- 
speare's monument, 496 n 2, 522-3 
and notes; his sketch of the Carew 
mommient, 523 and n i. See also 
69 n, 598 and n 

Duke, John, actor, 53 « 2 

Duke Humphrey, 263, 264 m i 

Duke's theatre, 537 

Dulwich manor. See under Alleyn, 
Edward 

Dumas, Alexandre, his version of 
Hamlet, 622; his criticism of Shake- 
speare, 637 

Dunkarton, R., his engraving of the 
'Janssen' portrait, 535 

Duport, Paul, and the Shakespearean 
controversy in France, 622 

Durant, GiUes, 713 

Duse, Eleonora, ItaUan actress of 
Shakespearean roles, 625 

Duval, G., French translator of Shake- 
speare, 623 

Dyboski, Prof. Roman, Polish trans- 
lator of Shakespeare, 631 

Dyce, Alexander, on the Two Noble 
Kinsmen, 438 ; his edition of Shake- 
speare, 582, 583 ; his acceptance of 
Steevens's ' Peele ' forgery, 646 



Earle, John, piratical publication of 
his Micro-cosmographie, 159 w; the 
work cited, 80 « i ; 452 n 

Earlom, Richard, 534 



Eden, Richard, his History of Travel, 
431 

Edgar, Eleazar, publisher, 669 

'Edinburgh Foho' edition, 585 n i 

Editors of Shakespeare, in the- eigh- 
teenth century, 571-82; in the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 
582-s 

Edward III, assigned to Shakespeare, 
140 seq., 159 ; sources of, 140-1 ; 
views of authorship by Capell, 
Tennyson, and Swinburne, 141 ; 
cf. 159, 265 n 

Edwards, Richard, author of two 
'friendship' plays, 217 n i; his 
Damon and Pythias, a tragicomedy, 
417 « I ; his lost play, Palemon and 
Arcyte, 438 

Edwards, Thomas, his Canons oj 
Criticism, 579 

Eld, George, printer, 160, 261, 367, 
678-9 

Elgar, Sir Edward, 608 

Elizabeth, Queen, at Kenilworth, 
24, 232; her palaces, 69; extrava- 
gant compliments to, 207 and » i ; ■ 
her death, 373 ; poetic panegyrics, 
227, 373-4; witnesses dramatic 
performance at Christ Church, 
Oxford, 438 ; her visit to Oxford 
(1592), 658; relations with the Earl 
of Southampton, 661 ; her company 
of actors, 47, 50 and « 2, 51 ; com- 
pany visits Stratford, 12 ; performs 
Henry V, 239 ; its later patrons, 376 
n I 

Elizabeth, Princess, marriage of, 384, 
432 and n 1, 443, 435, 449 

Ellacombe, H. N., 644 

EUain, Nicolas, 713 

EUesmere, Francis Egerton, first Earl 
of, 533 

Ellesmere, Sir Thomas Egerton, Baron, 
Lord Chancellor, 320, 458, 648-9 

Elsinore, Lord Leicester's company 
at, 86 n 

Elson, L. C, 644 

Elton, Charles I., 643 

'Ely House' portrait of Shakespeare, 
530 

Elze, Friedrich Karl, 615, 643 n 

Emaricdulfe, sonnets by E. C, 179 n 
2, 706 and n 3 

Enclosure of common lands : attempts 
by William and Thomas Combe at 
Stratford, 472 seq.; popular resent- 
ment, 473 

Ensor, Martin, stationer, 671 « 3 



INDEX 



727 



Erasmus, 653 n i 

Eschenburg, Johann Joachim, 612, 628 

Eslava, Antonio de, his 'Winter 

Evenings' (a collection of tales) 

and the plot of The Tempest, 423 n, 

426 n, 427 n I 
Espronceda, Jose di, his appreciation 

of Shakespeare, 626 
Esses, Robert Devereiuc, second Earl 

of, relations with Lopez, 135 n i ; 

allusions to in Henry V, 253-5 ; 

Earl Marshal of Ireland, 283-4; his 

rebellion and death, 255, 372, 

455 and n, 660-1 
Essex, Walter Devereux, first Earl of, 

visit of his company of actors to 

Stratford, 24 w 2 
Eton College, Ralph Roister Doister 

acted at, gi 
Euripides, 17 n i, 92 
Evans, Henry, lessee of Blackfriars 

Theatre, 65 and n 2, 66, 306 seq.; 

shareholder, 306, 312 
Evelyn, John, mentions Lord Claren- 
don's portrait of Shakespeare, 531 ; 

criticism of Shakespeare, 590 n 2 
'Eversley Shakespeare, The,' 584 
Exeter", players at, 82, 83 n 



Faithome, William, 528 

Faire Em, play of doubtful authorship, 
264, 265 and n i, 266, 267 and n i 

Fairholt, F. W., 584 

Falstaff, Sir John, named originally 
'Sir John Oldcastle,' 242; protests 
against the name, 242 ; attraction of 
his personality, 245, 246; Queen 
Elizabeth and, 246, 247 ; last mo- 
ments of, 252 ; the Countess of 
Southampton on, 663 and n 2 

Farmer, Richard, on Shakespeare's 
learning, 17, 596, 643 

Fastolf, Sir John, 243 

Faucit, Helen, afterwards Lady Martin, 
541, 604, 64s 

Faversham, players at, 82, 83 n 

Feind, Barthold, 611 

Felix and Philomena, The History of, 107 

'Felton' portrait of Shakespeare, 
535-6 

Felton, S., 535 

Ferro, Giovanni, his work on 'Imprese,' 
453 n 

Feuillerat, Prof. Albert, 65 n 

Fiamma, Gabriello, 711 w 2 

Fidele and Fortunio, 107 n i 



Field, Henry, father of Richard Field, 

41, 279 

Field, Jasper, brother and apprentice 
of Richard Field, 42 

Field, Nathaniel, actor and dramatist, 
97 n, 305 n ; as boy-actor, 340 

Field, Richard, of Stratford-on-Avon, 
settled in London, as printer's ap- 
prentice, 41 ; assistant to Thomas 
VautroUier, 41 ; succeeds Vautrollier, 
41 ; master of Stationers' Company, 

42, 147 ; death, 42 ; publishes 
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and 
Lucrece, 42, 142, 147. See also 277 
seq., 334, 396, 674 

Fiorentino, Giovanni. See under Gio- 
vanni 

Firenzuola, Agnolo, 711 « 2 

Fisher, Thomas, bookseller, 231 w i 

Fitton, Edward, 706 

Fitton, Mary, and the 'dark lady,' 
195 n, 689 n 

FitzwiUiam, Earl, 533 

Fleay, F. G., his History of the Stage, 
49 n 2, and passim; his works on 
Shakespeare, 643 

Flecknoe, Richard, 77 n 2, 403 n 

Fletcher, Dr. Giles, 148 and n 2 ; ad- 
mits imitation of other poets, 172; 
on insincerity of sonnetteers, 174; 
his Licia, 704 

Fletcher, John, residence in Southwark, 
27s, 276 n 2; his tragicomedies in 
collaboration with Francis Beau- 
mont [q.v.], 418 and n i ; Shake- 
speare's relations with, 435 ; Mas- 
singer's relations with, 435 ; col- 
laborates with Shakespeare in Two 
Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII, 
435, 437-47. See also 449, 498 

Fletcher, Lawrence, 83, 84 and notes, 
375, 379, 382 n i, 451 n i 

Florio, John, alleged original of Holo- 
f ernes, 104 n; sonnet prefaced to his 
Second Frutes, 155 and n 2 ; South- 
ampton's protege and Italian tutor, 

155 n 2, 156 n, 201, 658, 663; his 
translation of Montaigne's Essays, 

156 n; his Worlde of Wordes, 15 n 2, 
201, 666, 667, 677 and n 

'Flower' portrait of Shakespeare, 528- 

530 
Flower, Charles E., 541 
Flower, Mrs. Charles, 530 
Flower, Edgar, 528 
Foersom, Peter, Danish actor, and 

Shakespeare, 627 
Folger, H. C, owner of 'Droeshout' 



728 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



engraving of Shakespeare, 527 ; his 
unique copy of the 1594 quarto of 
Titus Andronicus, 131 «, 550, 551 « 2 ; 
his copies of the First Folio, 567. 
See also 551 n 2, 609 
Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays : 
First Folio, names of principal actors 
mentioned in, 53 w 2 ; account of, 
552-68; editors, printers and pub- 
lishers, 552-3 ; the license to 
publish, 554; order of the plays, 
555; form and price of, 555; 
actors' addresses to patrons, 556; 
Ben Jonson's share, 556; source 
and textual value of the 'copy,' 
557-59 ; relations of text to that of 
the quartos, 560; the typography 
and punctuation, 561 and not^s; ir- 
regularities of pagination, 561-3 ; 
the ' Sheldon' Folio, 562 ; Jaggard's 
presentation copy, 564-5 ; the 
'Turbutt' copy, 566; census of 
extant copies, 566-7 ; pecuniary 
value of, 567-8; reprints of, 568 
n I 
Second Folio, 568-9 
Third Folio, 56g-7o 
Fourth Folio, 570 
Folkestone, players at, 82, 83 n 
Ford, John, 166 w i 
Forman, Simon, on Macbeth, 393 and 
w I ; his notes on the early perform- 
ances of Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and 
Tempest, 420, 423 
Forrest, Edwin, American actor, 609 
Fortune theatre, Golden Lane, 60 w 2 ; 
internal structure, 74 n ; takings at, 
308 n; allowed to continue, 338, 380 
« I ; its destruction by fire, 446 n 2 
Fournier, Paul, his bronze statue of 

Shakespeare in Paris, 539 
Fowkes, Thomas, London printer, 

40 M 2 
France, Tudor English actors in, 85 ; 
criticism and versions of Shakespeare 
in, 618-23; stage representation of 
Shakespeare in, 623 
Frankfort-on-the-Main, English actors 

at, 8s 
Franz, W., 644 

Fraunce, Abraham, his Victoria, 107 n 
i; Spenser's allusion to, 151 n 2; 
his translation of Tasso's Aminta, 
665 n I 
Frederick, King of Denmark, 384 
Frederick V, Elector Palatine, husband 
of Princess Elizabeth, 376 n i, 384, 
432, 432 n I, 442, 449 



Freiligrath, Ferdinand, German trans- 
lator of Shakespeare, 614 

French, George Russell, his Shake- 
speareana Genealogica, 642 

Friendship, sonnets of, 205, 210—14; 
classical traditions of, 205 ; medieval 
and renaissance literary examples of, 
205 and n i, 206 

Friswell, J. Hain, his account of Shake- 
peare's portraits, 538 n 2 

Frittenden, Shakespeares at, i 

Fulbroke Park, 35 

Fuller, Thomas, allusion in his 
'Worthies' to Sir John Fastolf, 243, 
244; on the 'wit-combats' between 
Shakespeare and Jonson, 258; his 
notice of Shakespeare, 151 n 3, 641 

Fulman, William, '485 n, 641 

Furness, Horace Howard, his 'Vari- 
orum' edition of Shakespeare, 582, 
6og 

Furness, Horace Howard, junior, con- 
tinues his father's Variorum edition 
of Shakespeare, 582 

Furness, Mrs. Horace Howard, 645 

Furness, Walter Rogers, on the por- 
traits of Shakespeare, 539 n 

FurnivaU, F. J., 550 n i, 585 n i, 598, 
643 n 

Fuseli, Henry, 535, 608 



Gale, Dunstan, 675 

Gallup, Mrs., 652 

Gambe, Come de la, no w 

Garnett, Henry, the Jesuit, probably 
alluded to in Macbeth, 393 

Gamier, Robert, his Roman tragedies 
on Cfesar and Antony, 333 n i ; his 
tragedy Marc Antoine, 407 n 2 

Garrick, David, 27 n, 574, 599, 601-2 ; 
in Paris, 622 ; his collection of 
quartos, 551 

Garrick club bust of Shakespeare, 
537-8 

Gascoigne, George, his Supposes and 
Jocasta, performed at Gray's Inn 
Hall, 92 ; his 'tragicall comedie,' 93 ; 
his prose translation of Ariosto's 
Gli Suppositi, loi n 2 ; his definition 
of a Sonnet, 165 n i ; Shakespeare's 
indebtedness to the Supposes, 236 

GastreU, Francis, his demolition of 
New Place, and the mulberry tree 
there, 514 and n 

Gates, Sir Thomas, 428 

Gerbel, Russian translator of Shake- 
speare, 629 



INDEX 



729 



German, Edward, musician, 607 

Germany, English actors in, 84-5 and 
notes; Shakespearean representa- 
tions in, 610, 616-18; translations 
and criticism of Shakespeare in, 
8s n I, 611-16 ; Shakespeare society 
in, 616 

Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von, 613 

Gervinus, Commentaries by, 616 

Gesta Romanorum, 133 

Getley, Walter, 318 

Gilbert, Sir John, 608 

Gilborne, Samuel, 451 w i 

Gilchrist, Octavius, 643 

Gildon, Charles, on the rapid composi- 
tion of Merry Wives, 247 ; his criti- 
cism of Shakespeare, 572, 580 n 1 ; 
his adaptation of Measure jor 
Measure, 595 n i 

Giles, Nathaniel, 64 n i 

Giovanni Fiorentino, 18, 133, 247 

Glenham, Anne, Lady, 707 

Glenham, Sir Henry, 707 

Globe' theatre, Bankside, 60 n 2; 
erected from dismantled fabric of 
'The Theatre,' 60 n 2, 63 and n 2; 
its site, 63 » 4; performance at 
described by foreign visitor, 73 w i, 
cf. 386 n; seating capacity, 74; 
internal structure, 74 w i ; perform- 
ances at, 88, 127-8, 250, 254-5, 
264, 325, 346, 357, 367, 387, 393 and 
n I, 404-5, 420, 423, 442 seq. ; ref- 
erence to structure in Henry V, 250 ; 
its use in the Earl of Essex's rebel- 
lion, 254-5 ; Shakespeare's close 
relations with, 275-296 ; share- 
holders in, 300 seg. ; Shakespeare's 
shares in, 304 seq., 305 n i ; its 
destruction by fire, and rebuilding, 
305, 308, 445 seg. ; its later demoli- 
tion, 301 n 2 ; prices of admission, 
307-9 ; takings at, 307-9 ; lawsuits 
relating to, 310 n; value of shares 
in, 312 n I ; city's attitude to, 337 
seg., forged documents relating to, 
649. See also 379, 380 

'Globe' edition, 585 n 

Gloucester, players at, 82, 83 n. 

Goddard, William, his Satirycall Dia- 
logue, 692 and n 2 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, on acting in 
Rome, 79 « I ; criticism and adapta- 
tion of Shakespeare by, 613 and n, 
614, 616 

Golding, Arthur, his English version of 
Ovid's Metamorphoses, 21, 151 n 2, 
180, 181 and n 1, 182, 426 



GoUancz, Israel, 584 

Goodere, Sir Henry, 466 

Googe, Barnabe, 699 n 2 

Gorges, Arthur, 151 n 2 

Gosson, Henry, stationer, 406 

Gosson, Stephen, 133 

Gottsched, Johann Christoph, his 
denunciation of Shakespeare, 612 

Gounod, Charles, his opera of Romeo 
and Juliet, 624 

Gower, John, represented by the 
speaker of 'the chorus' in Pericles, 
402 ; his Confessio Amantis, 403 

Gower, Lord Ronald, his statue of 
Shakespeare at Stratford, 539 

Grammar schools, number of in Tudor 
England, 15 w i 

Grammaticus, Saxo, 353 and n i 

Grant, Baron Albert, 539 

Gravelot, Hubert F., engraver, 524, 
576 

Graves, Henry, 530 

Gray, J. W., on Shakespeare's marriage, 
■3 n, 643 

Gray, Thomas, 595 

Gray's Inn Hall, Comedy of Errors 
acted at, 139 and n i 

Graz, English actors at, 85 

Green, C. F., 644 

Green, Philip, 279 

Greene, John, 478 and n 2 ; 491 n 

Greene, Joseph, headmaster of Strat- 
ford grammar school, 11 w 

Greene, Richard, 11 w 

Greene, Robert, 94, 95 ; Shake- 
speare's indebtedness to, in 'Win- 
ter's Tale,' 98; his fraudulent 
disposal of his plays, 99 n; his 
attack on Shakespeare, 116 seq.; 
117 n 2; his repentance, 266; 
his share in the original draft of 
Henry VI, 122; in Titus An- 
dronicus, 131; treatment of Adonis 
fable, 145 ; his use of the induction 
in King James 0} Scotland, 235 n 2 ; 
on affluence of actors, 298; his 
use of the dedicatory epistle, 675 

Greene, Thomas, comedian, 54 » i ; 
lawsuit relating to, 311 n; cf. 
374 and n 2, 382 n 1 

Greene, Thomas, town clerk of Strat- 
ford, contributes to Stratford high- 
ways fund, 460 n I ; represents 
townsmen of Stratford against the 
enclosure of common lands by the 
Combes, 473 seg.; his career, 
474 n ; his alleged kinship with 
Shakespeare, 474 and n ; joint 



73° 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



owner with Shakespeare of Strat- 
ford tithes, 320-2, 475 ; his diary, 

475 n I ; negotiations with Shake- 
speare over Combe's enclosure, 

476 and n i, 478 

Greene, Thomas, yeoman of Bishop- 
ton, 474 n 

Greenstreet, James, 310 n 

Greenwich, royal palace at, 69, 87, 153 

Greenwood, G. G., 655 

Greet, hamlet in Gloucestershire, 
238 and n 2 

Greg, W. W., his view of the au- 
thenticity of the suspected 1619 
quartos, 550 n 

Grendon, near Oxford, 39 

Greville, Sir Edward, claim against 
Stratford-on-Avon, 316 

Greville, Sir Fulke, regrets circula- 
tion of uncorrected manuscript 
copies of the Arcadia, 158 n i; 
gives Queen Elizabeth the ap- 
pellation of 'Cynthia' in his verse, 
227; invocations to Cupid in his 
Cwlica, 166 n i, 708; his relations 
with Stratford, 465, 469 

Grevin, Jacques, his tragedy on 
Julius Ccesar, 333 n i ; his sonnets, 

713 

Griffin, Bartholomew, his Fidessa, 
267, 268 n, 707 

Griggs, W., 550 n 1 

Grignion, engraving of Shakespeare's 
tomb, 523 

Grimm, Frederic Melchior, Baron, 
his appreciation of Shakespeare, 
621 and n i 

Grooms of the Chamber, 375-82 and 
notes 

Groto, Luigi, 110 n, 711 n 2 

Gruzinski, A. E., Russian translator 
of Shakespeare, 629 

Guarini, Giovanni Battista, his pas- 
toral drama Pastor Fido and Shake- 
speare's sonnets, 185, 418 n i, 
711 n 2 

Guillim, John, his Display of Heraldrie 
cited, 13 M 

Guizot, Franfois, his criticism of 
Shakespeare, 622, 623 



'H., Mr. W., ' 'patron' of Thorpe's 
pirated issue of the Sonnets, 162, 
544; relations with Thorpe, 669- 
81 ; identified with William Hall, 
162 n I, 679; his publication of 



HALLIWELL 

Southwell's A Foure-fold Medita- 
tion, 162 n ; erroneously said to 
indicate the Earl of Pembroke, 
164, 682-5 

Hacket, Marian and Cicely, in the 
Taming of the Shrew, 236-8 

Hagberg, C. A., Swedish translator 
of Shakespeare, 627 

HakJuyt, Richard, his Principal Navi- 
gations and the 'new map,' 327 n 3 

Hales, Bartholomew, 469 

Hales, John, of Eton, on superiority 
of Shakespeare to aU poets, 588, 
589 n 

Hall, Bishop, 684 

Hall, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's grand- 
daughter and last surviving descend- 
dant, 28s, 461 ; legatee under 
Shakespeare's will, 487 ; marriage 
to Thomas Nash, 489, 505 ; cf. 
507 ; marriage to second husband 
John Bernard, 510-11, cf. 9, 321 
n 4; death and burial, 511 and n 2 ; 
her will, 512-13 ; her estate at Strat- 
ford, 512-13 

Hall, John, physician, Shakespeare's 
son-in-law, account of, 461 seq., 
505 seq. ; his sympathy with Puri- 
tanism, 463, 505 ; his Warwick- 
shire patients, 466, 476, 505 ; 
co-executor of Shakespeare's will, 
487-8, 491 ; his library, 492, 506; 
his sale of Shakespeare's theatrical 
shares to John Heminges, 492 
and w 3 ; his death and will, 506 ; 
his epitaph, 506 n ; his note-books, 
508 

Hall, John, limner, repaired Shake- 
speare's monument, 524, 525 

Hall, Susanna, daughter of the drama- 
tist, 9, 285 ; her marriage, 461 seq. ; 
victim of slander, 462 ; heiress to 
the dramatist's property, 497 seq.; 
executor of Shakespeare's will, 487- 
8, 491 ; her residence at Stratford, 
505 seq. ; account of, 506-8 ; en- 
tertains Queen Henrietta Maria 
at New Place, 507; her death and 
burial, 510; epitaph, 510 and n 

Hall. William {see also 'Mr. W. H.'), 
679 and n i 

Hall, William, visitor to Stratford, 
account of inscription over Shake- 
speare's grave, 484 and n 3, 642 

Halliwell, afterwards Halliwell- 
Phillipps, J. O., initiates public 
purchase of New Place, 514; his 
edition of Shakespeare, 584, 597, 



INDEX 



731 



HAMLET 

598; his Outlines (cited passim), 
642-3 

Hamlet, mention of travelling com- 
panies in, 71; Shakespeare's role 
in, 88 ; use of prose in, 102 n ; 
debt to John Lyiy, loi n 2 ; refer- 
ence to theatrical shares in, 309; 
allusions to boy-actors, 348, 349 ; 
account of, 353 ; date of produc- 
tion, 353 ; sources of the plot, 
353, 354; previous popularity of 
the story on the stage, 354 and n i, 
355 and n i ; the old play and its 
authorship, 355-7 ; Burbage creates 
the title-role, 357 ; contemporary 
comment on, 358-60; problem of 
its publication, 360; the First 
Quarto, 361-2 ; the Second Quarto, 
363 ; the First Folio version, 364 ; 
its world-wide popularity, 357, 
364-5, 593 ; the characters, 365 ; 
the 'humorous element, 365; the 
length of, 365 ; the German version 
of Hamlet {Dcr bestrafte Bruder- 
mord), 85 n, 355 n i ; editions of, 
553 seq. ; witnessed by Pepys and 
Evelyn, 590 and n 2 ; passages 
cited, 17 n i, 19, 80 n i, 104 n i, 
309, 334, 341, 342, 348, 362, 577 
and n 

Hamlet, the old play of, 355 seq. ; 
Kyd's share in, 356; revivals of, 
356-7 ; contemporary references to, 
357 

Hampton Court, royal palace at 
69; plays, at, 378 

Handwriting, Tudor modes of, 16; 
Shakespeare's use of 'Old English' 
script, 16, 519 

Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 364; his edi- 
tion of Shakespeare, 576, 577 and 
n I 

Hardy, Alexandre, his tragedy of 
Coriolan, 411 and n i 

Hardy, Sir Thomas DufTus, 650 n 2 

Harington, Sir John, his translation 
of Ariosto \q.v.], 324 

Harington, Lucy, her marriage to the 
third Earl of Bedford, 232 

Harness, William, 584 n 

Harriot, Thomas, 297 n 2 

Harrison, John, stationer, publisher 
of Venus and Adonis, 142 ; of 
Lucrece, 147 

Harrison, William, his Description 
of England, 643 

Harsnet, Samuel, his Declaration of 
Popish Impostures, 399 



Hart, Mrs. Joan, Shakespeare's sister, 
9, 316, 460; legatee under Shake- 
speare's will, 488; residence at 
Shakespeare's birthplace, and death, 
503, 507, 512 

Hart, John, 10 m i 

Hart, Joseph C, 651 

Hart, Michael, 488 

Hart, Thomas, son of Mrs. Joan 
Hart, 488, 512 

Hart, Thomas, the poet's grand- 
nephew, 9, 512 

Hart, William, Shakespeare's brother- 
in-law, 483, 488 

Hart, William, son of William above, 
488 

Harting, J. E., 644 

Harvard, copy of First Folio at, 568 

Harvey, Gabriel his mention of 
Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, 
150; bestows on Spenser the title 
of 'an English Petrarch,' 170; 
justifies imitation of Petrarch, 170 
w 2 ; on insincerity of sonnetteers, 
173; his parody of sonnetteering, 
174, 194; his advice to Barnes, 
202 ; his allusion to Hamlet, 358 
and n 1 ; Spenser's complimentary 
sonnet to, 709 

Harvey, William, 584 

Hasselriis, Luis, his statue of Shake- 
speare at Kronberg, 539 

Hathaway, Anne or Agnes, 26 seq.; 
her cottage, 26, 540. See also under 
Shakespeare, Ajine 

Hathaway, Bartholomew, 26 

Hathaway, Catherine, 26 

Hathaway, Elizabeth, 509, 512 

Hathaway, Joan, 26, 280 n, 512 

Hathaway, John, 27 n 1, 280 n 2 

Hathaway, Judith, 509, 512 

Hathaway, Richard, part author of 
play of Oldcastle, 244 

Hathaway, Richard of Shottery, 26 seq. 

Hathaway, Rose, 512 

Hathaway, Susanna, 512 

Hathaway, Thomas, 506, 509, 512 

Hathaway, William, 26 n i, 280 n 506 

Haughton, William. 546, 691 

Hawkins, Richard, 568 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 651 

Haydon, Benjamin, criticism of Ma- 
lone, 524 n; his visit to Stratford, 
525 M I ; his opinion of Shakespeare's 
bust, 525 n I 

Hayman, Francis, 576 

Hazlitt, WilHam, his Shakespearean 
criticism, 597, 645 



732 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Healey, John, 677 and w, 680 w, 684, 
68s 

Hearne, Thomas, 450 n 

Heine, Heinrich, studies of Shake- 
speare's heroines, 615 

Heminges, John, actor, member of 
Lord Chamberlain's company and 
life-long friend of Shakespeare, 
S3, n 2, 54 11, s6, 62, 375, 379, 382 » i ; 
residence in Aldermanbury, 276; 
shareholder in Globe theatre, 300 
seq. ; defendant in lawsuit respecting 
shares, 302 n i ; shareholder in 
Blackfriars theatre, 306, 307 n ; 
lawsuits relating to, 310 n; later 
relations with Shakespeare, 451 ; 
reputed creator of Falstafi, 451 ; 
executor of Phillip's will, 451 n i; 
summoned for giving dramatic 
performances during Lent, 451 n 2; 
legatee under Shakespeare's will, 
490 ; acquires Shakespeare's shares 
in Globe and Blackfriars, 492 and 
n 3 ; organised printing of First 
Folio, SS2 seq. 

Heminges, William, 303 w, 306 n, 307 n 

Hemynge, John, probably John Hem- 
inges, 457, 486 n 2, 491 11 

Henderson, John, actor, 602 

Henley Street, Shakespeare's property 
in, 316-17 

Henrietta Maria, Queen, visits Black- 
friars theatre, 66 « i ; at Stratford, 

S07 

Henry I and Henry II, plays attributed 
to Shakespeare, 263 

Henry IV (pt. i.), 80 « i ; performed 
at Court, 89, 433 ; use of prose in, 
loi n 2 ; debt to Lyly's Euphues, 
104 n 2 ; debt to Holinshed, 239 ; 
characterisation, 240 seq. ; men- 
tioned by Meres, 259 ; licensed for 
publication, 242 ; the inclusion of 
Oldcastle in dramatis persons, 
243-5 ; editions of, 547 seq. ; pas- 
sages cited, 7 » i; 23 w i, 93 w i, 
104 n I 

Henry IV (pt. ii.), use of prose in, loi 
n 2 ; references to Stratford per- 
sonages, 240 ; publication of, 242 ; 
the inclusion of Oldcastle in dramatis 
personcB; 243—5 ; characterisation, 
245-6 ; editions of, 548 seq. ; pas- 
sages cited, 36, 240, 241 n i, 242, 
243, 246 

Henry V, French dialogue in, 22; 
mention of the Globe theatre in, 
63 ; performed at Court, 89, 383 ; 



use of prose in, loi n 2 ; sonnet 
form in, 157 ; references to sonnet 
in, 176; account of, 250-4; date of 
production, 250; imperfect drafts 
of the play, 250 ; First Folio version 
of, 251 ; sources, 251 ; popularity 
of the main topic (victory of Agin- 
court), 251; the Choruses, 251, 
252 ; comic characters in, 252 ; 
Shakespeare's final experiment in 
the dramatisation of English his- 
tory, 252 ; allusions to the Earl of 
Essex in, 253-5 ; editions of, 548 
seq. ; Theobald's emendation in, 
575; passages cited, 176, 250, 253, 
S7S 

Henry V, The Famous Victories oj, 
groundwork of Henry IV and 
Henry V, 239 and n i, 241, 251, 252 

Henry VI (pt. i.), Shakespeare's 
share in revision of, 115 seq., 118- 
19; acted at Rose theatre, 115; 
Nashe's praise of, 116; Greene's 
attack on Shakespeare's share in, 
1 1 6-1 7; publication of, 118; Shake- 
speare's coadjutors, 122 seq.; edi- 
tions of, 546 seq. ; Crowne's re- 
vision, 595; passage cited, 117 

Henry VI (pt. ii.), editions of, 118, 
545 seq.; publication of, 119; full 
title of, 119-20; Shakespeare's share 
ill, 120—21; his coadjutors, 122 seq. 

Henry VI (pt. iii.), editions of, 118, 
545 seq. ; publication of, 1 20 ; full 
title of, 120; Shakespeare's share 
in, 120-21 ; his coadjutors, 122 seq. 

Henry VIII, attributed to Shake- 
speare and Fletcher, 435 ; account 
of, 439-46; previous plays on the 
topic, 440 and n i, n 2 ; prologue 
to, 441 and 71 I ; material drawn 
from Holinshed, 441 ; defects of 
the play, 441 and n 1, n 2, 442 ; 
dates of production and publica- 
tion, 442, 443 ; scenic elaboration 
of, 78, 81, 443 ; Sir Henry Wotton 
on, 443 n ; Shakespeare's share in, 
443-5; Fletcher's share, 443-4; 
Massinger's possible share in, 443 ; 
Wolsey's farewell speech, 444, 445 ; 
performance of, causes fire at Globe 
theatre, 445 seq. ; editions of, 554 
seq.; passages cited, 430 n 1, 441 

'Henry Irving Shakespeare, The,' 
584 

Henryson, Robert, his treatment of 
the story of Cressida, 370 

Henslowe, Philip, builds Rose theatre, 



INDEX 



733 



6i ; manager, 336, 366, 546 ; owner 
of Paris Garden, 302 n ; his takings 
as manager of Rose and Nevvington 
theatres, 307 n ; produces a play 
Palamon and Arsett, 438; his Diary, 
642 

Heraldic grants, 281 seq. 

Herbert, Sir Henry, licenser of plays, 
308 H, 558 n 

'Herbert, Mr. William,' his alleged 
identity with 'Mr. W. H.,' 682-5 

Plerder, Johann Gottfried, 613 

Herford, C. H., 584 

Herringman, H., 570 and n 

Hess, Johann Rudolf, 611 

Hayes, Laurence, son of Thomas 
Heyes, 137 n 

Heyes or Haies, Thomas, pubHsher, 
137 and n 2 

Heyse,' Paul, German translator of 
Shakespeare, 614 

Heywood, Thomas his references to 
actors' provincial tours, 82 n ; to 
foreign tours, 86 n 2 ; as actor and 
dramatist, 96, 654; his pride in the 
actor's profession, 97 ; complains of 
publication of crude shorthand re- 
ports of plays, 112 n 3 ; his poems 
pirated in the Passionate Pilgrim, 
269 ; his allusion to the boy-actors, 
348; amemberof the Lord Admiral's 
company, 366; a 'groom of the 
chamber,' 376 and n i, 381 ; his 
admiration of Shakespeare, 501 n, 
588 ; his elegy on Southampton, 
667 ; his reference to Shakespeare 
as ' Will, ' 690 ; his A pology for 
Actors cited, 48 « i, 82 w, 85 w 2 ; 
his London Florentine, 373, 376 
and n 1 ; his General History of 
Women, 545 

Higden, Henry, his Wary Widdow, 
592 

Hilliard, Nicholas, his' Shakespearean ' 
miniature, 536 

Historie of Error, The, 108 

Histriomastix, 343, 366 n i 

Hodgson, Sir Arthur, 536 

Hoe, Robert, 545 n, 569-70 

Holinshed, Ralph, Shakespeare's in- 
debtedness to, 23, 98, 119, 124, 127, 
140, 239, 392, 397, 398, 421, 441 

Holland, English actors in, 85 and n 2 ; 
translations of Shakespeare in, 627 

Holland, Hugh, his tribute to Shake- 
speare in First Folio, 556, 587 

Holmes, Nathaniel, 652 

Holmes, William, bookseller, 679 n 2 



Holyoake, Francis, 505 n 

Holyoake, Thomas, 505 n 

HolyweD, Benedictine priory, the site 
of 'The Theatre,' 58 and n 

Home, Sir Gregory, 379 

Homer, 21 

Hondius, his 'View of London,' 63 n 2 

Hooker, Richard, 38 w 2 

Hoole, Charles, 16 « 3 

Hope theatre, Southwark, 60 n 2, 
74 n I 

Horace, his claim for the immortality 
of verse, 16, 21, 186 and n 3 

Home. William, 489 n 2 

Horneby, Richard, 322 

Horneby, Thomas, 322 

Houbraken, engraving of 'Chandos' 
portrait, 534 

Howard of Effingham, Lord Charles, 
Lord High Admiral, patron of 
Spenser, 210; his company of 
actors, 50, 96, 367 ; performs in Lon- 
don 55 n I ; includes Edward Alleyn, 
61 and n i ; temporarily amalgam- 
ated with Lord Chamberlain's com- 
pany, 61 » I ; perform before Queen 
Elizabeth, 373 and n 3 ; taken under 
patronage respectively of Prince 
Henry of Wales and Elector Pala- 
tine, 376 n I 

Howe, Earl, owner of Vandergucht's 
crayon copy of 'Chandos' portrait, 
533 ; his collection of quartos, 551 

Huband, Sir John, 320 

Huband, Ralph, 319 

Hubbard, George, 64 n 

Hudson, Rev. H. N., 584 

Hughes, Mrs. Margaret, plays female 
parts in the place of boys, 601 

Hughes, WiUiam, and 'Mr. W. H.,' 
163 and n 

Hugo, Frangois Victor, translator of 
Shakespeare, 623 

Hugo, Victor, 623 

Hume, David, his censure of Shake- 
speare, 595 

Hume, Captain Tobias, his Poetical 
Musicke, 668 

Humphry, Ozias, crayon copy of 
'Chandos' portrait, 533. 

Hungan.', translation and performance 
of Shakespeare's plays in, 631 and 
n 2 

Hunsdon, George Carey, second Lord, 
entertains Flemish envoy at Hunsdon 
House, 245 ti; succeeds first Lord 
Hunsdon as Lord Chamberlain and 
patron of the company of actors. 



734 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



known later as the ' King's servants,' 
53-4, cf. 66 « I, 81 w I ; plays per- 
formed by, 88, 112-13, 125, 132, 
231 n I, 24s n, 249, 346 » 2, 360, 366, 
375 

Hunsdon, Henry Carey, first Lord, 
Lord Chamberlain, his company of 
actors, known later as the 'King's 
servants,' 52-3 ; Shakespeare's as- 
sociation with, 55-6; places of 
performances, 61, 81 m i ; pro- 
vincial tours, 81 seq.; plays per- 
formed, 23s, 357. See also 245 n, 337 

Hmit, Simon, 15 

Hunt, Thomas, 525 

Hunt, WiUiam, 514 

Hunt, WiUiam Oakes, 525 

Hunter, Rev. Joseph, 597, 642, 682 n 

Huntington, Archer, 551, 566 

Huth, A. H., 566 

Hyatt, Mrs., a married sister of John 
Combe of 'The College,' 469 

Hyde, John, mortgagee of 'The 
Theatre.' 52 w 2 

'Hynrn,' term applied to secular 
poems, 202, 202 n 

Hythe, players at, 82, 83 n 

Immeemann, K., his staging of Shake- 
speare in Germany, 617 

Imprese, see 453 seq., and especially 
453 w; Shakespeare's use of the 
word, 4S4 n 1 

India, translations and representations 
of Shakespeare in, 632 

Induction, the device of the, in Eliza- 
bethan drama, 235 n 2 

Ingannati, Gli, its resemblance to 
Twelfth Night, 329 and n 3, 330 

Inganni, Gli, and Twelfth Night, 329 
and n 1, n 2 

Ingram, Dr., loi w i 

Ingres, J. D. A., his portrait of Shake- 
speare, 624 

Inns, used for theatrical performances, 
see especially, 60 n 2 

Inns of Court, dramatic performances 
at, 71 

Interludes, 90, 91 n 

Inverness, 84 and n i 

I phis and I ant ha, 263 

Ipswich, players at, 82, 83 n, 84 w i 

Ireland, Samuel, on Shakespeare's poach- 
ing episode, 35 ; his forgeries, 647 

Ireland, William, 457 n i 

Ireland, WUliam Henry, forgeries 
of Shakespeare's signatures, 518; 
his Shakespearean forgeries, 647 



JAMES 

Irishman, the only, in Shakespeare's 
dramatis personae, 252 

Irving, Sir Henry, 605 and n i 

Italics, use of, by Elizabethan and 
Jacobean printers, 693 and n 

Italy, Shakespeare's alleged travels 
in, 86; translations and perform- 
ances of Shakespeare in, 624, 626 ; 
the sonnet vogue in, 718 n 2 

Ives, Brayton, 567 

Jack Drum's Entertainment, 344 and n, 
345 

Jackson, John, 457, 486 n 2 491 n 

Jacob, Edward, 140 n 3 

Jaggard, Isaac, 553 seq. 

Jaggard, William, printer, 132 n 3 ; 
prints unauthorised edition of Mer- 
chant of Venice, 137 n, 549 and n 2; 
piratically inserts two of Shake- 
speare's sonnets in his Passionate 
Pilgrim, 159, 267, 268 n, 669, 674; 
his Passionate Pilgrim, 267-8, 396 
w 2, 543, 553, 707 ; prints suspected 
Shakespearean quartos of 1619, 549 
and n 2 ; prints the First Folio, 
552 seq.; acquires right to print 
'players' bills,' 553; his presenta- 
tion copy of the First Folio, 564 seq. 

Jaggard, William, his Shakespeare 
Bibliography, 645 

James VI of Scotland and I of England, 
his accession to the English throne, 
226, 227, 228; his progress through 
London, 378 seq.; his dislike of 
crowds referred to by Shakespeare, 
391 and n ; appeal to, in Macbeth, 
392 ; his sonnets, 709 ; his en- 
couragement of drama, 48, 54, 
84 n; his patronage and payment 
of actors, 313-14, 432-3 and notes; 
grants recognition as the 'King's 
Servants' to Lord Chamberlain's 
company, 375 seq. and notes; mem- 
bers of company, 451 ; act at Wilton, 
377 ; at Hampton Court, 378 ; take 
part in royal processions and func- 
tions, 379 and » 3 ; at Somerset 
House, 380 seq. and notes; perform- 
ances of Shakespeare's plays, 113, 
127, 361, 367. 383 seq., 385-6, 395-6, 
405, 437 ; performances of other plays. 
88, 262-6, 346 

James II, Shakespeare's plays per- 
formed by his (the Duke's) company, 
592 w 

James, Sir Henry, 568 w i 

James, Dr. Richard, 243 



INDEX 



735 



JAMESON 

Jameson, Mrs. Anna, 645 

Jamyn, Amadis, 191 n i, 703, 712, 
713 M 

Jansen or Johnson, Garret, tomb- 
maker. See Johnson, Garret 

' Janssen' portrait of Shakespeare, 534- 
S ; copies of, 534 71 

Janssen, Bernard. See Johnson, Ber- 
nard 

Janssen van Keulen, Cornelis, his por- 
traits of Shakespeare, Jonson, and 
Milton, 534 

Jenkins, Thomas, 15 

Jennens, Charles, 533 ; owner of 
'Janssen' portrait, 534-5; his edi- 
tion of King Lear, 534; his collec- 
tion of quartos, 551 

Jewel, Bishop, 38 « 2 

Jodelle, Etienne, Shakespeare's prob- 
able debt to, 146 n i, 193, and n; 
212,213, 214; his Cleopatre Captive, 
408 n; his interpretations of 'im- 
prese, ' 453 n; his sonnets, 712-13 

John, King, 97 ; absence of prose 
in, loi n 2, 137; date of composi- 
tion, 137 ; debt to contemporary 
plays on the theme, 138 ; publication 
of, 139; nientioned by Meres, 259; 
editions of, 550 seq.; passages cited, 
121 n I 

John, The Troublesome Raigne of King, 
attributed to Shakespeare, 137-8, 
263 

Johnson, Arthur, publisher of Merry 
Wives, 249, 548 

Johnson, Bernard, 495 n 2, 496 n 2 

Johnson, Garret, senior, makes John 
Combe's tomb, 470; his tombs for 
the third and fourth Earls of Rut- 
land, 494-5 and notes; his family, 
494-S 

Johnson, Garret, junior, 494; the 
probable maker of Shakespeare's 
tomb, 495 and n 2 ; his bust of 
Shakespeare, 522 

Johnson, Mrs. Joan, 277 n i 

Johnson, Nicholas, tombmaker; his 
tomb for the fifth Earl of Rutland, 
495 and notes, 496 n 2, 523 n; other 
work by, 495 n 2 

Johnson, Robert, of Stratford-on-Avon, 
317 and n i 

Johnson, Robert, lyrics set to music by, 
433 and n 3 

Johnson, Samuel, on English vogue of 
Mantuanus, 16 » ; on Shakespeare's 
early employment in London, 46 ; 
on Othello, 389; on Shakespeare's 



JONSON 

share in Henry VIII, 443; his edi- 
tion of Shakespeare, 580, 581 ; his 
editorial fees, 575 n 2; his biography 
of Shakespeare, 642 

Johnson, William, 51 n i, 457, 486 n 2, 
491 n 

Jones, Inigo, 70 

Jones, Robert, his First booke of Songes, 
328 n I 

Jones, Thomas, 35 

Jonson, Ben, his knowledge of the 
classics, 22 and n; his walking tour 
from London to Edinburgh, 38 n; 
his use of legal phrases, 44 and n, 
654; his references to the Globe 
theatre, 63, 447 ; as actor and dram- 
atist, 96 ; his criticism of Shake- 
speare's hasty workmanship, 98 ; his 
plays censored, 128; his reference 
to Titus Andronicus, 130; tributes 
to Shakespeare, 151, 153; his view 
of Petrarch, 174 w i; identified by 
some as the 'rival poet,' 204; his 
apostrophe to the Earl of Desmond, 
210 ; his use of the 'induction,' 235 n 
2 ; relations with Shakespeare, 256, 
257 ; and The Phoenix and Turtle, 270 ; 
his relations with the boy actors, 340 ; 
the actors' share in his literary 
controversies, 342-6; Shakespeare's 
attitude to, in the controversy about 
the actors, 348-52 ; his criticism of 
Julius Caesar, 352 n 1 ; and Kyd's 
Spanish Tragedy, 356 n i ; sneers at 
Pericles, 404 n i ; allusion to Corio- 
lanus in his Silent Woman, 410 n i ; 
sneering references to Winter's Tale 
and Tempest, 423, 433, 455 n ; 
Shakespeare's reputed epitaph on, 
472 n; his latest relations with 
Shakespeare, 480; his elegy on 
Shakespeare, 499; his tribute to 
Shakespeare, 500 and n 2, 587 ; his 
lines on the Droeshout engraving of 
Shakespeare, 526 and n i ; his lines 
on portrait in First FoHo, 555; 
alleged authorship of dedicatory 
address in First Folio, 556-8, 557 n; 
on Shakespeare's ease in writing, 557 ; 
his burial in Westminster Abbey, 
500; portrait by Janssen, 534; edi- 
tion of his works, 552 and « i ; his 
works referred to, Bartholomew Fair, 
261, 433, 438; The Case is Altered, 
343 and n i ; Catiline, 353 n, 589 n 2 ; 
Cynthia's Revels, 235 n 2, 344 and n 2, 
348 n I ; Eastward Ho, 346 ; Every 
Man in his Humour, performed, 



736 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



JONSONTJS 

88 and n i ; use of name of ' Prospero ' 
in, 426 n I ; Shakespeare's role in, 
255; Every Man out of his Humour, 
23s n 2, 343 ; Hiie and Cry after 
Cupid, 703 n 3 ; New Inn, 404 n i ; 
Poetaster, 144 n, 345-6, 347 n, 349- 
51 ; Sejanus, produced at the Globe, 
88 and n i ; Silent Woman, 276 n 1, 
410 n i; Staple of News, 352 n; 
Timber, or Discoveries, 352 n, 500 and 
n 2 ; Underwoods, 447 and n i ; Vol- 
pone, Thorpe's dedication, 675 n 3 

Jonsonus Virhius, 22 n 

Jordan, John, account of Shakespeare's 
drinking bout at Bidford, 481 n i ; 
his Shakespearean forgeries, 646 and 
n 2 

Jordan, Thomas, 79 « i 

Jordan, Mrs., actress, 604 

Jourdain, Sylvester, 428 

Julius Caesar, use of prose in, 102 n ; 
date of composition, 332, 333 and» i ; 
earlier plays on the topic, 332, 333 n i, 
334; debt to Plutarch, 98, 2>3,3', 
characterisation, 335; a rival piece 
on the subject, 336; acted at Court, 
433; editions of, 554; the Dulce of 
Buckingham's revision, 595 n i ; 
passage cited, 334 

Jusserand, J. J., his appreciation of 
Shakespeare, 623 



Kanshin, p. a., Russian translator of 
Shakespeare, 629 

Karamzine, N., Russian translator of 
Julius Caesar, 628 

Kean, Charles, 604 

Kean, Edmund, 603 

Keats, John, 180 

Keck, Robert, 533 

Keller, A., German translator of Shake- 
speare, 614 

Kelway, Robert, 496 n 2 

Kemble, Charles, actor, 623 

Kemble, John Philip, his collection of 
quartos, 551; his acting, 603; pro- 
duction of Vortigern, 647 

Kemp, William, actor, 36 w 2 ; mem- 
ber of the Lord Chamberlain's com- 
pany, S3 « 2 ; acts at Court, 55, 153 ; 
his fee for acting there, 299 and n 2 ; 
joins Burbage in building of Globe 
theatre, 62 ; at Elsinore, 86 n ; 
creator of Peter in Romeo and Juliet, 
87, iii; and of Dogberry in Much 
Ado, 324; his shares in Globe 



theatre, 300 seq.; abandons his 
share, 304 

Kenilworth, Queen Elizabeth's visit to, 
24, 232^ 

Kent, WiUiam, designs Shakespeare's 
monument in Westminster Abbey, 539 

Kesselstadt death mask of Shakespeare, 
S38 

Kesselstadt, Francis von, 538 

Ketzcher, N., Russian translator of 
Shakespeare, 629 

Keysar, Robert, lawsuit against Hem- 
inges and Condell, 310 n; estimate 
of his shares in Blackfriars theatre, 
312-13, 312 n 

Kildare, Countess of, 675 

KiUigrew, Thomas, director of King's 
{i.e. Charles II) company of actors, 
592 n ; his substitution of women for 
boys in female parts, 600 

' King's servants.' See under James I 

Kirkland, Shakespeares at, i 

Kirkman, Francis, publisher, 264-5 

Kneller, Sir Godfrey, his copy of 
'Chandos' portrait, 533, 591 

Knight, Charles, 588 

Knight, Joseph, 570 « 

Knollys, Sir William, 689 n 

Kok, A. S., Dutch translator of Shake- 
speare, 627 

Konigsberg, English actors at, 85 

Korner, J., German translator of Shake- 
speare, 614 

Kraszewski, Jozef Ignacz, Polish trans- 
lator of Shakespeare, 631 

Kreyssig, Friedrich Alexander Theodor, 
his studies of Shakespeare, 615 

Kyd, Thomas, 94, 95, 140 n 3 ; his 
share in Titu^ Andronicus, 131 ; and 
the story of Hamlet, 355, 356; 
Shakespeare's acquaintance with the 
work of, 356 n i 



Labe, Louise, 713 andw 

Lacy, John, 276 n 2, 595, 641 

La Harpe, and the Shakespearean con- 
troversy in France, 621 

Lamartine, A. de, on Shakespeare, 623 

Lamb, Charles, 438, 532 n, 603 

Lambarde, William, 255 

Lambert, Edmund, mortgagee of the 
Asbies property, 14 and n 2, 236 

Lambert, John, 14 n 2, 290 

Lane, John, his slander of Mrs. Susanna 
Hall, 462 



INDEX 



737 



Lane, Nicholas, creditor of John 
Shakespeare, 279 

Lane, Richard, 320 

Laneham, John, actor, 51 « i 

Lang, Andrew, 655 

Langbaine, Gerard, 266; notice of 
first edition of Titus Andronicus, 
132 n I 

Larivey, Pierre de, his La Fidelle, 107 
n I 

Laroche, Benjamin, French translator 
of Shakespeare, 623 

Law, Ernest, 379 seq., and notes, 649, 
650 n 

Lawe, Matthew, publisher, acquires 
rights in Richard III and Richard II, 
125 11 I, 242 n 1 

Lawrence, Sir Edwin D., 652 

Lawrence, Henry, 457 

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 535 

Lear, King, performed at Court, 89, 
397 ; prose in, 102 n ; account of, 
395-400 ; dates of composition and 
publication, 395, 396 and n i, n 2, 
397 ; Butter's imperfect editions, 
396 and n i, n 2, 397 and n i ; 
sources of the plot, 397-399 ; Shake- 
speare's innovations, 399 ; the great- 
ness of the tragedy, 399, 400 ; editions 
of, 548; Tate's revision, 595; passage 
cited, 577 n 

Leblanc, Abbe, 619 

Legal knowledge of Shakespeare, 43-4 
and notes, 175, 706 

Legge, Thomas, his Ricardus Tertius, 
124 

Leicester, players at, 82, 83 ??. 

Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, his 
entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at 
Kenilworth 24, 232 ; his Warwickshire 
regiment in the Low Countries, 36 ; 
his early company of players, 47 «, 49, 
51 ; names of his Hcensed players, 
SI n I ; their visits to Stratford, 
24 n 2, 55 ; growth of company, 52 ; 
merged in Earl of Derby's company, 
52, 55 ; his actors in London, 55 w i ; 
in Germany and Denmark, 85 n 2 

Leir, King, the old play of, 398 and n 

Lembeke, G., Danish translator of 
Shakespeare, 627 

Lenox, James, 609 

Lenox, Lodovick Stuart, Earl of, 376 
n I 

Lent, dramatic performances pro- 
hibited in, 80 and n i . See also 340, 
451 « 2 

Leo, F. A., 21 w I 

3 B 



Leoni, Michele, Itahan translator of 
Shakespeare, 625 

'Leopold' edition, 585 n 1 

Lermontov, and Shakespeare, 629 

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, his defence 
of Shakespeare, 612 

Lessing, Otto, his statue of Shake- 
speare at Weimar, 539 

L'Estrange, Sir Nicholas, 256 

Le Tourneur, Pierre, French translator 
of Shakespeare, 620 

Life and Death of Jack Straw, The, 126 

Lilly, John. See Lyly, John 

Lily, WiUiam, his 'Sententiae Pueriles,' 
16, 18 

Linche, Richard, his Diella, 707 

Ling, Nicholas, publisher, 106 n 2, 
113 n I, 360 n 2, 363 and n i, 553 

Linley, William, 607 

Lintot, Bernard, 377 n i, 543 

Lister-Kaye, Sir John, 536 

Lloyd, WiUiam Watkis, 584 

Locke (or Lok), Henry, 668, 710 

Locke, John, glover, of Stratford-on- 
Avon, 40 « 2 

Locke, Matthew, musician, 607 

Locke, Roger, son of John Locke, of 
Stratford, printer's apprentice in 
London, 40 n 2 

Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 567, 568 

Locrine, Tragedie of, 260 

Lodge, Thomas, 1 7 n, 95 ; Shake- 
speare's indebtedness to his Rosalynde 
in As you like it, 98, 325-6 ; in Venus 
and Adonis, 145-6, 146 n i ; his use 
of the 'sixain,' 146; Spenser's ref- 
erence to, 151 n 2; his plagiarisms 
in his Phillis, 172 and n 2, 704; and 
the old play of Hamlet, 357; his 
use of the word 'will,' 691 

London, plague in, 80, 81 n, 378; 
routes to, from Stratford-on-Avon, 
39-40 ; population of, 40 ; natives of 
Stratford settled in, 37 and n, 41 seq. 

London Prodigall, The, 261 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 26 « i 

Lopez, Roderigo, original of Shylock, 
13s and n i 

Lord Admiral's company of actors. 
See under Howard of Effingham, 
Loi'd Charles 

Lord Chamberlain's company of actors. 
See under Hunsdon, first and second 
Lords, and Sussex, Earl of 

Lorkin, Rev. Thomas, on the burning of 

the Globe theatre, 446 n i 
Love, language of, in Elizabethan poets, 
206, 207 ; similar in poems addressed 



738 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



either to men (friends and patrons) 
or to women, 208, 2og n 

'Lover' and 'love.' synonymous with 
'friend' and 'friendship' in Eliza- 
bethan English, 206 n i 

Lover's Complaint, A, Shakespeare's 
responsibility for, 161 and n i 

Love's Labour's Lost, performed at 
Court,_ 8g, 106 153, 383; use of 
prose in, loi n 2 ; first play written 
by Shakespeare, 102 ; Robert Tofte's 
reference to (i5g8), 102 n 1 ; the 
plot, 103 ; reference to contemporary 
persons and incidents, 103 and n; 
debt to John Lyly, 104 seq.; pubU- 
cation of, 106 and notes, 113 n i; 
state of text, 106; sonnet form in, 
155 and n i ; alleged ridicule of 
Florio in, 156 n; affinities with the 
Sonnets, 157 ; reference to sonnets 
in, 175; mentioned by Meres, 250; 
eclitions of, 548; passages cited, 18 
and n i, 20, 175, 191, 192 n i, 692 

Love's Labour's Won, 234, 259 

Lowell, James Russell, 17 n i, 608 

Lowin, John, shareholder in Globe 
theatre, 306 n, 307 n 

Lowndes, William T., 645 

Lucian, his dialogue of Timon, 402 

Lucrece, account of, 146 seq.; metre 
of, 146-7 ; pubhcation of, 42, 147 ; 
sources of the story, 147-8; echoes 
of Daniel's Rosamond in, 147 ; dedi- 
catory letter to the Earl of South- 
ampton, 148-9; popularity of, 149; 
contemporary praise of, 150; edi- 
tions, 151, 177, 221, 259, 542; Ga- 
briel Harvey's mention, 358; extant 
copies of early editions, 543 n; 
passages cited, 7 w i ; 76 w i 

Lucy, Sir Thomas, of Charlecote, his 
prosecution of Shakespeare for 
poaching, 34-5 ; caricatured as 
Justice Shallow, 36, 240, 248, 465 ; 
Shakespeare's pun on the name, 36 
and n i ; his funeral, 283 n 2 

Lucy, William, grandson of Sir Thomas 
Lucy, 36 M I 

Ludwig, Otto, his studies of Shake- 
speare, 615-16 

Lumley, John Lord, his portrait of 
Shakespeare, 534 

Lydgate, John, his Troy hooke drawn 
on for Troilus and Cressida, 370. 

Lyly, John, 94, 95, loi n 2 ; influence 
of his Euphues on Shakespeare's 
comedies, 104 and n 1, 166, 233 ; his 
Court comedies, 104-5 and n; his 



repartee, word-play, and conceits, 
105 ; influence on Two Gentlemen, 
106-7; his treatment of friendship 
in Euphues, 217, 218; his Cam pas pe, 
and Midas, 327 

Lynn, plague at, 82 w i 

Lyte, Sir H. Maxwell, 649 



Macbeth, use of prose in, 102 n ; accoimt 
of, 392-5 ; date of composition, 391 ; 
the story drawn from Holinshed, 392 ; 
Shakespeare's manipulation of the 
story and the additions of his own 
invention, 392 ; its appeal to James I 
(of England), 392, 393 ; publication, 
393 ; the scenic elaboration, 393 and 
n I ; the chief characters, 394 ; points 
of difference from the other great 
Shakespearean tragedies, 394 ; inter- 
polations by other pens, 395 ; Mid- 
dleton's plagiarisms, 395 ; editions of, 
554; D'Avenant's adaptation, 594; 
passages cited, 19 » i, 84 w i, 121 w i, 
392, 395, 407 n, 575 

MacCallum, M. W., 644 

McCarthy, Henry, monument of 
Shakespeare in Southwark cathedral, 
540 n 

McCullough, John Edward, American 
actor, 609 

MacGeorge, Bernard Buchanan, 567- 
9 

Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 607 

Macklin, Charles, 602 

Maclise, Daniel, 525 n, 608 

Macpherson, G., his Spanish trans- 
lation of Shakespeare, 626 

Macready, William C, 604, 623 

Madden, D. H., 644 

Madden, Sir Frederick, 519 

Magellan, 431 

Magny, Olivier de, 712-13 

Maid Lane, Southwark, 63 w 4 

'Maidenhead' inn, Stratford-on-Avon, 
9-10 

Maidstone, players at, 82, 83 n 

Maine or Mayenne, Due de, 103 n i 

Mainwaring, Arthur, 473 seq., 476 and 
n 2, 648 

Malherbe, lines on Montaigne, 526 n 

Malone, Edmund, 46; on Shake- 
speare's first theatrical employ- 
ment, 46 ; his share in repair of 
Shakespeare's monuments, 524; his 
edition of the Sonnets, 543-4; his 
Shakespeare collection, 551 ; his 



INDEX 



739 



critical works on Shakespeare, 580; 
his edition of Shakespeare, 580-2, 
597 ; his life of Shakespeare, 642 ; 
his Shakespeare papers, 650 « 

Malvezzi, Virgilio, 653 n 

Manners, Lady Bridget, 455 n, 659 

Manningham, John, diarist, records 
general desire for Southampton's 
release, 228; his description of 
Twelfth Night, 328, 420; anecdote 
of Burbage, 452 and «; his account 
of 'impr^se' at Whitehall, 453 n; 
on 'will,' 692 and n 1 

Mantuanus, or Mantuan, Baptista, 
his Latin eclogues, 16 and » 3, 18 
and n 2 

Manuche, Cosmo, 558 n 

Manzoni, Alessandro, his apprecia- 
tion of Shakespeare, 625 

Marino, Giovanni Battista, 172, 71 1 » 2 

Markham, Gervase, his adulation 
of Southampton in his sonnets, 
200, 203, 666 

Marlborough, players at, 82, 83 n 

Marlowe, Christopher, 95, 115, 116, 
118, 140-1 ; his share in 2 Henry VI, 
122 and n, 123; his influence on 
Shakespeare's work, no, 123 seq., 
126-7, 134-5 ; his violent death, 123 ; 
Shakespeare's allusions to, 136; 
influence of his Hero and Leander 
on Venus and Adonis, 143, 672; 
his translation of Ovid's Amores, 
144 n I ; his translation of Lucan, 
160, 162, 672, 673, 678; absence of 
his autographs, 517. See also 553, 
646, 652 

Marlowe, Julia, American actress, 609 

Marmontel, and the Shakespearean 
controversy in France, 621 

Marot, Clement, his treatment of 
love and friendship, 218; his inter- 
pretation of 'imprese,' 453 n; his 
sonnets, 711 

Marquets, Anne de, 709, 713 

Marshall, F. A., 588 

Marshall, John, his library at Strat- 
ford, 15 M 2 

Marshall, William, 528, 544 

Marston, John, on popularity of 
Romeo and Juliet, 61 » 3, 112 and n i ; 
identified by some as the 'rival poet, ' 
204 ; his use of the ' induction, ' 235 n 
2 ; contributes to The Phoenix and 
the Turtle, 270; his comedy, What 
You Will, 327 n 2; relations with 
the boy actors, 340; his Scourge of 
Villanie, 342 ; his Histriomastix, 



MERCHANT 

343 and n i ; his quarrel with Jonson, 
342-6 ; publication of his Malcon- 
tent, 346; publishes his Parasitaster 
himself, 677 ; his share in Blackfriars 
theatre, 303, 312 •» 

Martin, Martyn or Mertyn. See 
under Slater, Martin 

Martin, Lady. See Faucit, Helen 

Martin, Dr. William, 64 n 

Mason, John, shareholder in White- 
friars theatre, 303 

Massey, Gerald, on the Sonnets, 161 n 2 

Massinger, Philip, his use of legal 
phrases, 44 ; his association with 
John Fletcher, 435, 443 

Masuccio, no n 

Matthew, Sir Tobie, 653, 663 

Matthew, Toby, bishop of Durham, 
709 

Matthews, Brander, 608, 646 

Mayne, Jasper, 22 n, 556 

Meade, Jacob, 303 n 

Meadows, Kenny, 584 n 

Measure for Measure, performance at 
Court, 89, 383, 386, 649 ; use of 
prose in, loi n 2 ; dates of composi- 
tion and production, 385, 386 ; first 
published in First Folio, 386 ; treat- 
ment of theme in French and Italian 
sixteenth-century drama and fiction, 
389, 390 ; sources, 389 ; Shake- 
speare's variations on the old treat- 
ment, 390, 391 ; the name of Angelo, 

390 and n 2 ; creates character of 
Mariana, 391 ; philosophic subtlety 
of Shakespeare's argument, 391 ; 
references to a ruler's dislike of mobs, 

391 and n 1 ; D'Avenant's revision 
of, 594; passages cited, 30 n i, 216 
n 2, 385, 391 

Meighen, Richard, 568 

Mencke's £eA:icow, 611 

Mendelssohn, Felix Bartholdy, 618 

Mennes, Sir John, 6 n 

Merchant of Venice, The, performed 
at Court, 89, 383 ; Marlowe's influ- 
ence in, 123; sources, 133 seq.; 
debts to II Pecorone, Gesta Roman- 
arum, and Wilson's Three Ladies of 
London, 134; traces of Marlowe's 
influence, 135 seq.; Shakespeare's 
study of Jewish character, 135-6; 
date of composition, 136; publica- 
tion of, 137 ; state of text, 137 ; un- 
authorised reprint of, 137 n 1 ; 
mentioned by Meres, 259; editions 
of, 548 seq.; passages cited, 12 m 2, 
19 n I, 23 n I 



740 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Merchant Taylors' School, dramatic 
performance by boy actors of, 324 

Meres, Francis, credits Shakespeare 
with Titus Andronicus , 130; his 
commendation of Shakespeare's 
'sugred sonnets,' 159, 177, 65g ; 
testimony to Shakespeare's reputa- 
tion, 258, 259 

Mermaid Tavern, 257, 258 

Merry Devill of Edmonton, The, 263, 
264, 26s and n i 

Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 35 ; 
performed at Court, 89, 383 ; use 
of prose in, loi n 2 ; reminiscences 
of Marlowe in, 136 ; account of, 246- 
9 ; date of composition, 246 ; sources, 
247 ; publication of, 249 ; editions of, 
547 seq.; passages cited, 18, 38 n, 
136, 249, 257 11 I, 268 n, 463 n 2, 
n 3 

Mertyn. See under Martin 

Metrical tests in Shakespearean drama, 
loi and n i 

Mezieres, Alfred, on Shakespeare, 623 

Michael Angelo, 'dedicatory' sonnets 
of, 209 n 

Michel, Francisque, French trans- 
lator of Shakespeare, 623 

Middle Temple, Gorboduc produced 
at, 91 ; Twelfth Night at, 328 

Middleton, Thomas, his allusion to 
mortality from plague, 80 w 2 ; his 
allusion to La Mothe, 104 n; his 
plagiarisms of Macbeth in The Witch, 
39S ; MS. of The Witch, 55S n 

Midsummer Night's Dream, date of 
composition, 231 and n i, 232, 231- 
3 ; reference to Queen Elizabeth's 
visit to Kenilworth, 232 ; sources, 
106, 232, 233 ; mentioned by Meres, 
259; editions of, 548 5eg.; witnessed 
by Pepys, S9o; passages cited, 24, 
78, 93 n I, 577 n 

Millais, Sir John, 608 

Millington, Thomas, publisher, 119, 
120 and n 132 

Milton, John, applies epithet 'sweet- 
est' to Shakespeare, 259 n i; his 
Minor Poems (1645) printed by 
Moseley, 263 ; his portrait by Jans- 
sen, 534 ; his tribute to Shakespeare 
printed in Second Folio, 587 

Miniatures of Shakespeare, 536 

Minto, Prof. W., 204 n 

Miracle plays, 90 and n i 

Moliere, extant signatures of, 517 w i 

Mollineux, Sir Richard, 704 

Monarcho, 104 n 



MULBERRY 

Money, value of, in Shakespeare's 

England. See 3 n 2, 296 n i 
Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 397 
Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth, 620 
Montaigne, Michel de, 519, 652; 

Shakespeare's indebtedness to, 22, 

429 ; lines on T. de Leu's portrait of, 

526 n 
Montegut, Emile, French translator 

of Shakespeare, 623 
Montemayor, George de, his Diana, 

107 and notes 2 and 3, 427 n i 
Montesquieu, on English acting, 79 71 
Montgomery, Philip Herbert, Earl 

of, 556, 661, 685; his 'impresa,' 455 

n I 
Monti, Vincenzo, his appreciation 

of Shakespeare, 625 
Montjoy, Christopher, 276 seq., 517 
Montjoy, Mary, 277 n i 
Montolin, C, Catalan translator of 

Macbeth, 626 
Montreux, Nicolas de, his tragedy of 

CUopatre, 407 n 2 
Moorfields, 58-9 
Moralities, 90, 91 n 
Moratin, Leandro Fernandez di, 

Spanish translator of Hamlet, 626 
Morgan, J. Pierpont, his copy of the 

First Folio, 564 n 2, 567 
Morgann, Maurice, on Falstaff, 596, 

597 

Morhof, Daniel Georg, 611 

Morley, Lord, 685 n 

Morley, Thomas, musician, his First 
Booke of Consort Lessons, 328, 607 

Morris, Matthew, 491 w 

Mortlake, 377 

Moschus, 703 

Moseley, Humphrey, publisher, 263, 
264, 43S, 436 and n 2, 559 n 

Mothe or La Mothe, 103 n i 

Moulton, Richard G., 645 

Mucedorus, play of doubtful author- 
ship, 264, 265, 266, 403 n I 

Much Ado about Nothing, performed 
at Court, 89, 433 ; use of prose in, 
loi n 2 ; references to sonnets in, 
176; account of, 324-5; date of 
composition, 324; sources, 98, 324, 
325 ; characters of Shakespeare's 
invention, 325 ; parts taken by the 
actors Kemp and Cowley, iii n 3, 
325; publication of, 331; editions 
of, 553 ; passages cited, 20 n 2, 39, 
149 n 2, 176, 357 n, 692 

Mulberry tree, Shakespeare's, 288, 
289 n, 514 and n 



INDEX 



741 



Mulcaster, Richard, head master of 
Merchant Taylors' School, 324 

Munday, Anthony, his use of the 
'induction,' 235 n 2; part author 
of play of Oldcastle, 244, 336. See 
also 107 n I, 134 n 2 

Munich, English actors at, 85 

Muret, Marc-Antoine, his tragedy 
on Julius Cassar, ^^2> « 

Murray, Sir David, of Gorthy, 4go 

Murray, John Tucker, his English 
Dramatic Companies, 40 11 2 and 
passim 

Musaeus, 143 

Music, on the Elizabethan stage, 79 
and n i 

Musset, Alfred de, influence of Shake- 
speare on, 622 

Mystery plays, 90, 91 w 



Nash, Anthony, 322 n i ; legatee 
under Shakespeare's will, 489 and n 2 

Nash, Edward, 509-10, 513 

Nash, John, legatee under Shake- 
speare's will, 489 and n 2 

Nash, John, son of Anthony Nash, 
489 n 2 

Nash, Thomas, son of Anthony Nash, 
285 and n i ; married Elizabeth 
Hall, 489, 504; accoimt of, 504; 
legatee under John Hall's will, 506, 
507; death and burial, 508-9, 511; 
his will, 509 and n 1 

Nash's House, 514-15, 540 

Nashe, Thomas, 112 n 3, 116; his 
mention of i Henry VI, 116; falls 
under ban of censor, 128; piracy 
of his Terrors of the Night, 159 n; 
on the immortalising power of verse, 
187; his dedication of Jack Wilton 
to, and his sonnets addressed to 
Southampton, 200; on the perse- 
cution of actors, 337 ; and the old 
play of Hamlet, 355 ; his praise of 
Southampton, 664 and n, 665 and 
n I, n 2; his Life of Jack Wilton, 
664, 665 ; his Pierce Penniless, 664 ; 
on the sonnet, 699 n 2 ; his praise of 
Sidney's sonnets, 700 n 3 

Navarre, King of, 103 n 1 

Naylor, E. M., 644 

Neagle, James, 535 

Neil, Samuel, 643 n 

Nekrasow, Russian translator of Shake- 
speare, 629 

Newcastle, Margaret, Duchess of, her 
criticism of Shakespeare, 591-2 



OLDCASTLE 



Newcastle, miracle plays at, 91 « 

Newdegate, Lady, 682 m, 689 n 

Newington Butts theatre, 60 w 2, 61 ; 
takings at, 307 » ; performances at, 
235. 357. 43S 

Newman, Thomas, piratical publisher 
of Sidney's Sonnets, 158 n i, 700 

New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, built 
by Sir Hugh Clopton, 288 ; purchase 
and repair of, by Shakespeare, 288; 
mulberry tree at, 288; its owners 
and occupants, 289 and n, 514 n 2; 
later fortunes, 512 seq., 540 

Newport, Edward, 458-9 

New Romney, players at, 82, 83 n 

New Shakspere Society, 645 

Nichols, John, 533 

Nicholson, George, 84 n 

Nicolai, Otto, 618 

Nodier, Charles, his appreciation of 
Shakespeare, 621 

Nonsuch, royal residence at, 69 

Norris, J. Parker, his account of Shake- 
speare's portraits, 538 n 2 

North, Sir Thomas. See under Plu- 
tarch 

Northampton, Henry Howard, Earl of, 
28s n 3, 505 

Northampton, William Parr, marquis 
of, 287 11 

Northcote, Lord, 536 

Northumberland, Henry, ninth Earl of, 
patron of men of letters, 297 n 2, 708 

Northumberland, Lucy, Countess of, 
708 

Norton, Thomas, his Gorhoduc, 91 

Norwich, players at, 82, 83 n 

Nottingham, Earl of. See under 
Howard, Charles 

Nottingham, players at, 82, 83 n 

Nuremburg, English actors at, 85, 
86 » 

Nyblom, C. R., Swedish translator of 
Shakespeare's Sonnets, 628 



Oberon, vision of, 232 ; in Huon of 

Bordeaux, 233 
Oechelhaeuser, Wilhelm, 617 
Ogilby, John, 276 n 2 
Okes, Nicholas, printer, 387, 396 
'Old Spelling Shakespeare, The,' 585 

n I 
Oldcastle, Sir John, play on his history, 

244 and n i, 245 and n, 261 ; acted 

at Hunsdon House, 66 n i 
Oldcastle, Sir John, the original name 

of FalstaS in Henry IV, 241, 242, 243 



742 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Oldys, William, 35 n 2, 88 and n 4, 
377 n I, 532, 642 

Olney, Henry, 707 

Onions, C. T., 645 

Opie, John, 608 

Orator, The, 134 n 2 

Orford, Earl of, s6g 

Orrian, alias Currance, Allan, son of 
Thomas Orrian, of Stratford, printer's 
apprentice in London, 40 » 2 

Orrian, Thomas, tailor of Stratford-on- 
Avon, 40 « 2 

Ortelsburg, English actors at, 85 

Ortlepp, E., German translator of 
Shakespeare, 614 

Ostler, Thomasina, lawsuit against 
her father John Heminges, 310 w, 
312; estimate of the value of her 
theatrical shares in Globe and Black- 
friars theatres, 311, 312 and w 

Ostler, William, shareholder in Globe 
theatre, 305 ; in Blackfriars theatre, 
307 n ; a boy actor, 340 

Othello, use of prose in, 102 n ; account 
of, 385-9 ; dates of composition and 
production, 385; performed at 
Court, 385, 433, 649 ; publication of, 
386, 387 ; indebtedness to Cinthio, 
98, 387, 388 and « I, w 2 ; new char- 
acters and features introduced by 
Shakespeare, 388 ; exhibits his fully 
matured powers, 389; its posthu- 
mous printing, 550; passages cited, 
432 n I, 500 n 2 

Otway, Thomas, 595 

Ovid, 16, 22 ; his influence on Shake- 
speare, 177, 180, 181 andw, 233, 426; 
his claim for the immortality of verse, 
186 and n 3; his Amores, 20; 
quoted on title page of Venus and 
Adonis, 144 n\ partly translated 
by Marlowe, 144 n i ; popular with 
Elizabethans, 144 n i ; his Fasti, 
147 ; his Metamorphoses {see also 
under Golding, Arthur), 20 and notes 
I and 2, 21 and n i, 144-S, 180, 181 
and n 1, 182, 426 ; Shakespeare's copy 
of, 21, 519 

Owen, Sir Richard, 537, 538 

Oxford, players at, 82, 83 n, 440; 
Hamlet at, 361 and n 2 

'Oxford' edition, 585 « 

Oxford, Earl of, his company of actors 
at Stratford, 24 « 2 ; in London, 
50 « I, 55 n I ; patron of Watson, 

675, 699 
Oxford, Edward Harley, Earl of, his 
alleged miniature of Shakespeare, 536 



Padua, copy of First Folio at, 567 
Page, William, his account of Shake- 
speare's portraits, 538 n 2 
'Painted cloths,' 7 and w i 
Painter, William, indebtedness of 
Shakespeare to his Palace of Pleasure, 
no and M, 141, 147, 400, 411. 
Palamon and Arsett, 438 
Palmer, John, 462 «, 469 n i 
Palmer or Palmes, Valentine, 322 w i 
Par, Anfos, Catalan translator of 

King Lear, 626 
Paris, copy of First Folio at, 562, 567 

and n i 
Paris Garden theatre, shares in, 302 n 2 ; 
performance of the old Hamlet at, 

357 

Parrot, Henry, 298 n 1, 470 n i 

Partridge, William Ordway, his statue 
of Shakespeare in Chicago, 539 

Paschale, Lodovico, 704 

Pasqualigo, Luigi, his II Fedele, 
107 n I 

Pasquier, Etienne, 712 

Passerat, Jean, 712-13 

Passionate Pilgrim, The, piratical 
insertion of two sonnets in, 267 ; 
contents of, 267 n 2 ; editions of, 
543 ; included in Poems of 1640, 544 

Patteson, Rev. Edward, 519 

Pavier, Thomas, printer, 113 n, 
120 n, 231 n I, 244, 24s n, 261, 
262, 396 n 2 ; his share in the sus- 
pected quartos of 1619, 137 n, 
548, 549 and notes 

Pavy, Salathiel, boy actor, Jonson's 
elegy on, 340 

Pedantius, Latin play of, 653 n 

Peele, George, 94, 95, 116, 151 n 2; 
as actor and dramatist, 96; his 
alleged share in Henry VI, 122; 
in Titus Andronicus, 131 ; his use 
of the 'induction' in Old Wives' 
Tale, 235 n 2 ; protege of the Earl 
of Northumberland, 297 n 2 ; his 
praise of Southampton, 659; forged 
letter of, 646 

Pelayo, Menendez y, his apprecia- 
tion of Shakespeare, 626 

Pembroke, Countess of, dedication 
of Daniel's Delia to, 199, 701 ; 
her translation of Garnier's Marc 
Antoine, 407 n 2 

Pembroke, Henry Herbert, second 
earl of, 659 n i ; his company of 
actors, 49 and n 3 ; performances 
by, 56, 120, 131, 23s n I 

Pembroke, William Herbert, third 



INDEX 



743 



Earl of, 164, 377 and n 2, 381, 556, 
658 n, 677 and n i ; his 'impresa,' 
455 n 2 ; question of identification 
with 'Mr. W. H.,' 164, 682-5; 
Shakespeare's relations with, 686-9, 
dedication of First FoHo to, 687 

Penrith, Cumberland, Shakespeares 
at, I 

Penzance, Lord, 655 

Pepys, Samuel, 531 ; his criticisms 
of the Tctnpest, Midsummer Night's 
Dream, and Hamlet, 590 

Percy, Sir Charles, his testimony 
to Shakespeare's growing popu- 
larity, 259 n 2 

Percy, William, plays of, 558 n i ; 
friend of Barnabe Barnes, 703 ; 
his Ccelia, 705 

Perez, Antonio, 13s n 1 

Pericles, 402-6; date of composition, 
402 ; Shakespeare's collaboration 
in, 402 ; sources, 402, 403, 404 and 
n I ; incoherences of the piece, 
403 ; contemporary criticism of, 
404 n I ; the quarto editions, 
404 and n, 405 ; Shakespeare's 
share in, 405 ; reference to ' im- 
presa' in, 459 n 

Perkes, Clement^ in Henry IV, 240 

Perkin, John, 51 » i 

Perkins, Thomas, his copy of the 
Second Folio, 568 and n 2, 569 

Perrin, Cornwall, players at, 82 n 

Perry, Marsden J., his collection of 
the Folios, 567-9, 609 

Peruse, Jean de la, 712 

Pescetti, Orlando, his tragedy on 
Julius CcBsar, 333 n i 

Petowe, Henry, elegy on Queen 
Elizabeth, 227 

Petrarch, emulated by Elizabethan 
sonnetteers, 154, 156, 171, 172, 705 
seq.; Spenser's translations from, 
170; Shakespeare's indebtedness 
to, 177, 178, 183 and n 3 

Phelps, Samuel, 584 n i, 604 

Phillips, Augustine, member of the 
Lord Chamberlain's company, 53 n 
2 ; 56, 62 ; induced to revive 
Richard II at the Globe (1601), 
254, 255 ; residence in Southwark, 
275 ; his false claim to heraldic 
honours, 285 seg.; shares in Globe 
theatre, 300 seq., 302 n 1 ; has 
articled pupils, 314; a 'groom 
of the Chamber,' 375, 379, 382 n i ; 
later relations with Shakespeare, 
45156?. and ?}ofej; his will, 451 n 1,492 



Phillips, Edward, Milton's nephew, 
his criticism of Shakespeare, 599 n 
I, 642; editor of Drummond's 
poems, 709 n i 

Phillips, Thomas, his portrait of 
Shakespeare, 525 

Phoenix theatre, Drury Lane, 60 « 2 

Phoenix and the Turtle, The, account 
of, 270 seq.; Shakespeare's con- 
tribution to, 272-3 

Pichot, A., 622 

Pickering, William, London printer, 
40 n, 584 

'Pictorial edition' of Shakespeare, 
584 

Pike, William, pseudonym for William 
Lucy, 36 w I 

Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The, 259, 
299 

Pindar, his claim for the immor- 
tality of verse, 186 and n 3 

Pindemonte, IppoUto, of Verona, his 
imitation of Shakespeare, 625 

Plague, at Stratford-on-Avon, 12 
and w I ; in London and provinces, 
12 w I, 377-9; dramatic perform- 
ances prohibited during time of, 
80, 81 n, 348, 378 

Plato, his influence on Shakespeare, 
177-180 

Plautus, 16, 19, 20; his influence 
on English drama, 91 ; his Meji- 
(Bchmi, 108; in English translation, 
109; his Amphitruo, 109 

Players' quartos, 100 n i, 547, 558 
and n 

Playhouse yard, Blackfriars, 65 « i 

Plays, sale of, 99 and n; revision 
of, 99 ; their pubUcation depre- 
cated by playhouse proprietors, 
100 n; fees paid for, 99 n; 313-14, 
315 n 

Pleiade, La, 711-12 

Plessis, Comte de, 653 n i 

Plume, Archdeacon Thomas, his MS. 
coOection of anecdotes, 6 n, 472 n i 

Plutarch, Shakespeare's indebted- 
ness to, 98, 232, 332, 333-4, 400, 407 
and n i, 408 and n, 409, 411 and n 2, 
412, 413; North's translation of 
his Lives, 41, 334 and n i, 407 

Plymouth, players at, 82, 83 n 

Poel, William, 607 

Poems (1640) Shakespeare's, 544 
and n 2, 545 ; stationer's entry of, 
544 n 2 ; contents, 545 ; rarity of 
volume, 545 and n i ; later editions, 
545 



744 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Poems on Affairs of State, 543 

Poland, study of Shakespeare in, 
630 and w 3, 631 and n i 

Pole, Sir Geoffrey, 706 n 3 

Pollard, A. W., his Shakespeare 
Folios and Quartos, 550 n, 554 n 2, 
64s 

Pollard, Thomas, holder of theatrical 
shares, 303 n, 306 n 

Poniatowski, King Stanislas, his appre- 
ciation of Shakespeare, 630 and « 2 

Ponsard, Francois, and the Shake- 
spearean controversy in France, 
622 

Pontoux, Claude de, name of his 
heroine copied by Drayton, 173 ; 
Shakespeare's probable debt to, 
193; his work, 705, 713 

Pope, Alexander, 450 w; tribute to 
Shakespeare, 501 ; his edition of 
Shakespeare, 573-4, 575 and n 2, 
642 

Pope, Thomas, actor, member of 
the Lord Chamberlain's company, 
S3 « 2 ; residence in Southwark, 
27s ; his false claim to heraldic 
honours, 285 seg.; shares in Globe 
and Curtain theatres, 300 seq., 
302 n I ; his will and bequests, 
61 n 2, 62, 492 n 2, 493 

Pope, Sir Thomas, 286 

Pope, Sir William, 496 n 2 

Porter, Charlotte, 584 

Porto, Luigi de, 110 n 

Pott, Mrs. Henry, 652 

Powell, Thomas, 675 

Poynter, Sir Edward, on the 'Flower' 
portrait, 529 

Preston, Thomas, his tragedy of 
Camhises, 93 n 

Prevost, Abbe, 619 

Pritchard, Mrs., 602 

'Private' theatres, 60 n 2, 67 and n i, 
338 

Privy Council, orders for regulation of 
the theatres, 337-9 and notes 

Procter, Bryan Waller (Barry Corn- 
wall), 584 w I 

Propert, Lumsden, 536 

Prose, use of, in Elizabethan drama, 
loi and n 2 

Provincial tours of actors. See esp. 
81 seq. 

Puckering, Lady Jane, wife of William 
Combe of Warwick, 317 w 3 

Puckering, Sir John, first husband 
of Lady Jane Puckering, 317 n 3 

Purcell, Henry, 607 



Puritaine, The, or the Widdow of 
Waiting Streete, 261, 262 

Puritanism, hostility to the drama, 
337; prevalence of, at Stratford, 
13 n, 463-4; Shakespeare's refer- 
ences to, 463 n 3 

Pushkin, and Shakespeare, 628 

Pyramus and Thisbe, 233 



QuADRADO, Jose Maria, his Spanish 
versions of Shakespeare, 626 

Quadrio, Francis, 624 

'Quality,' meaning of, 87 w 2 

Quarles, Francis, 542 

Quarles, John, his continuation of 
Lucrece, 542 

Quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays : 
publication, 545 seq.; original price 
of, 546; publication objected to 
by theatrical managers, 546; pi- 
rated editions, 546; the 'copy,' 
547 ; textual value of, 547 ; popu- 
larity of, 547 ; suspected quartos of 
1619, 548-9 and notes; scarcity 
of, 549; lithographed facsimiles of, 
550 n I ; chief collections of, 551 ; 
bibliography of, 551 n i; present 
prices of, 551 w 2 ; quartos neglected 
by the editors of -the First Folio, 
559; relation of text of quartos to 
that of First Folio, 560 

Quartorzain, meaning and use of, 
699 n 2, 700 n 3 

'Queen's players' in Henry VIH's 
reign, 50 « 2 

Quiney, Adrian, sues John Shake- 
speare for debt, 279-80. See also 
292 seq., 29s n i 

Quiney, Judith, Shakespeare's 

daughter, 32, 281, 460 n; her 
marriage to Thomas Quiney, 38 n, 
462-3 ; excommimication for irregu- 
larity of marriage, 480; legatee 
imder Shakespeare's will, 488; her 
residence at Stratford, 504; her 
sons, 504 ; her death and burial, 
504 ; cf . 509 

Quiney, Richard, the elder, his knowl- 
edge of Latin, 18 « i ; account 
of, 38 n; bailiff of Stratford-on- 
Avon, 292 ; appeals in London for 
help for Stratford, 292 seq.; his 
letter to Shakespeare, 294-5, 295 n 
I ; cf. 462, 478 n 2 

Quiney, Richard, the younger, brother 
of Thomas Quiney the elder, 38 n, . 
504 



INDEX 



745 



Quiney, Richard, son of Thomas 
Quiney the elder, 504, 507 

Quiney, Thomas, the elder, his knowl- 
edge of French, 18 « i ; his marriage 
to Judith Shakespeare, 38 n, 462 ; 
account of,, 504 ; cf. 509 

Quiney, Thomas, the younger, son of 
Thomas Quiney the elder, 504 

Quinton, Hacket family at, 237 



RACKH.4M, Arthur, 608 

RadcliSe, Ralph, his version of Tito 
and Gcsippo, 217 w i 

RaLnsford, Sir Henry, the elder, 465 ; 
patron of Michael Drayton, 465, 
466 n I ; his wife, 465 ; friend of 
Thomas Combe, 467-8; legatee 
xmder John Combe's will, 469 ; cf. 
512 n 3 

Rainsford, Sir Henry, the younger, 
466 n, SI 2 w 3 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, adoration of 
Queen Ehzabeth, 207, 227 

Raleigh, Prof. Sir Walter, his life of 
Shakespeare, 645 

Ramsaj^, Plenry, 22 « 

Ramsden, Lady Guendolen, 535 

Raphael, epitaph on tomb of, 497 n 

Rapp, M., German translator of 
Shakespeare, 614 

Ratseis Ghost, 278, 279 n i, 300 

Ratsey, Gamaliel, 278, 298 

Ravenscroft, Edward, on Titus An- 
dronicus, 130 

Red Bull Theatre, 54 mi, 74 « i ; 
lawsuit relating to, 311 n 

Reed, Edwin, 652 

Reed, Isaac, 579, 580 n, 581 

Rehan, Ada, American actress, 609 

Reinhardt, Max, his staging of Shake- 
speare in Germany, 617, 618 

Renan, Ernest, his Caliban, 623 

Replingham, William, 473 

Restoration, the, adapters of Shake- 
speare under, 592-3 

Return from Parnassus, The, 259, 260, 
298; Shakespeare and, 351, 352 

Revels, Master of the, 70 seq. and 
notes ; account books of, 649, 650 n 

Reynoldes, Thomas, 489 

Reynoldes, WiUiam, legatee under 
Shakespeare's will, 489 and n 1 

Reynolds, John, 708 n 3 

!l^eynolds. Sir Joshua, his copy of 
the 'Chandos' portrait, 533; his 
illustrations of Shakespeare, 608 



Rhyme royal, used by Shakespeare in 
Lucrcce, 146-7 ; by Daniel in his 
Complaint of Rosamond, 147-8 

Rich, Penelope, Lady, 700 

Richard II, absence of prose in, loi n 

2, 126; Marlowe's influence in, 
123, 126; date of composition, 
125; debt to Holinshed, 127; pub- 
lication of, 127; editions of, 127; 
state of text, 127; Unes censored 
by the licenser of plays, 1 28 ; its 
use in the Earl of Essex's rebellion, 
129; mentioned by Meres, 259; 
reference to 'impresa' in, 454 w i; 
editions of, 548 seq. ; Tate's revision, 
595 

Richard II, old play of, witnessed by 
Simon Forman at Globe theatre, 
126 n 

Richard III, 99; Marlowe's influence 
in, 123-4; debt to Holinshed, 124; 
contemporary Latin and English 
plays on the subject, 123-4; Swin- 
burne's praise of, 124; publication 
of, 125, 126 n, 548; editions of, 125; 
mentioned by Meres, 259; passages 
cited, 124, 351 

Richard, Duke of Vorke, The True 
Tragedie of, first draft of Henry VI, 
pt. 3 [q.v.] acted by Earl of Pemr 
broke's company, 56 

Richards, Nathaniel, his Tragedy of 
Messalina, 74 n 1 

Richardson, John, 27 and 11 2, 29 

Richardson, Nicholas, 586 w i 

Richardson, WiUiam, 596 n i, 597 

Riche, Barnabe, his Apolonius and 
Silla, 107 n 3, 330 and n i 

Richmond, royal palace at, 69, 153, 
373 and n 3 

Rippon, George, 534 

Ristori, Mme., Itahan actress of 
Shakespearean roles, 625 

Roberts, James, printer, 132 and n 

3, 136-7 and n, 231 n i, 360 and 
n 2, 364 and n i, 366, 549, 553, 
703 

Robertson, J. M., on Shakespeare's 
legal knowledge, 43 n, 655 

Robertson, Sir Johnston Forbes, 606 

Robin Goodfellow, 378 

Robinson, John, witness of Shake- 
speare's will, 483 and n i 

Robinson, John, lessee of Shakspeare's 
house in Blackfriars, 458, 483 n i, 
491 n 

Roche, Walter, 15 

Rogers, Henry, 279 



746 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Rogers, John, vicar of Stratford, 
483 n I 

Rogers, Philip, sued by Shakespeare 
for debt, 321, 322 n i 

Rolfe, W. J., 584 

Roman de Troyes, Benoit de Ste. 
More's, the first mediaeval version 
of the story of Troilus and Cressida, 
369 w 

Romantic drama, 92 

Romeo and Juliet, revived at 'The 
Theatre,' 61, 75, 81 n; early German 
translation of, 85 n; influence of 
Marlowe in, 109; sources of, no 
and n i ; debt to BandeUo, 98, no; 
Kemp's acting in, in; date of 
composition, in; its popularity, 
112-13; editionsof, 112-13, 54.7 seq.; 
sonnet form in, 155; references to 
sonnetteering in, 175; mentioned 
by Meres, 259; Otway's revision, 
59S; passages cited, 175, 186 

Romney, George, 535, 608 

Ronsard, Pierre de, plagiarised by 
English sonnetteers, 171; imi- 
tated by Shakespeare, 145, 177, 
178, 183, 184, 1S9 n I, 193; on the 
immortality of verse, 187 n; his 
mottoes for 'imprese,' 453 n. See 
also 703-4, 7 1 1- 1 3 and notes 

Rose Theatre, Bankside, 56 n 2; 
60 n 2, 61, 274 n I ; takings at, 
307 n; performances at, 115, 
398 

Rosenfeldt, N., Danish translator of 
Shakespeare, 627 

Rosseter, Philip, 707 n 3 

Rossi, Italian actor of Shakespearean 
roles, 625 

Rossini, his opera of Otello, 625 

Roubiliac, Louis Franfois, probable 
sculptor of the Garrick Club bust, 
537 ; his statue of Shakespeare in 
British Museum, 537, 539 

Rowe, Nicholas, on Aiine Hathaway's 
family, 26 ; on Shakespeare's poach- 
ing adventure, 35 ; on Shakespeare's 
early employment, 45-6; on Shake- 
speare's acting, 88; on the story of 
Southampton's gift to Shakespeare, 
197; on Queen Elizabeth's enthu- 
siasm for the character of Falstaff, 
246; on Shakespeare's later life, 
448; account of John Combe's 
epitaph, 470 n 2, 471 and n 2; 
his edition of the plays, 545, 572-3 ; 
his editorial fees, 575 n 2; his 
memoir of Shakespeare, 642 



Rowington, Shakespeares at, 2; ac- 
comit of manor of, 318 

Rowlands, Samuel, 675 

Rowley, Samuel, his play on Henry 
VIII, 440 and n 2 

Rowley, William, actor and dramatist, 
97 n, 265 

Roydon, Matthew, poem on Sir 
Philip Sidney, 210, 272 

Riimelin, Gustav, 615 

Rupert, Prince, at Stratford-on-Avon, 
507-8 

Rusconi, Carlo, Italian translator of 
Shakespeare, 625 

Rushton, W. L., 644 

Ruskin, John, on receptivity of genius, 
96 n 

RusseU, Henry, 490 n i 

RusseU, Thomas, overseer pf and 
legatee imder Shakespeare's will, 
490 and n i ; account of, 490 

Russia, translations and performances 
of Shakespeare in, 628-30; romantic 
movement in, and Shakespeare, 628 

Rutland, Edward Manners, third 
Earl of, tomb of, 494 

Rutland, Elizabeth, Cotmtess of, 
wife of Roger, fifth Earl and daughter 
of Sir PhiUp Sidney, patroness of 
men of letters, 455 « 

Rutland, Francis Manners, sixth Earl 
of, invites Shakespeare to devise 
his 'imprese,' 453 seq.; his rela- 
tions with the Earls of Southampton 
and Essex, 455 ; his entertainment 
of James I at Belvoir, 455 seq. and 
notes; cf. 651 w 

Rutland, John Manners, fourth Earl 
of, tomb of, 494 

Rutland, Roger Manners, fifth Earl 
of, tomb of, 495, 523 n; friend of 
Southampton, 659, 663 

Rye, players at, 82, 83 n 

Rymer, Thomas, his censure of Shake- 
speare, 590, 592 



S. I. M., tribute by, to Shakespeare in 
Second Folio, 588 and n i 

Sackville, Thomas, Earl of Dorset and 
Lord Buckhurst, author of Gorboduc, 
91, 380 n 2, 683 n 2 

Sadler, Hamnet or Hamlet, godfather 
to Shakespeare's son Hamnet, 32, 
37 n, 482 ; account of his family, 482 
and n 3 ; witness to and legatee under 
Shakespeare's will, 482, 489 



INDEX 



747 



Sadler, John the elder, 322 n i, 460 n, 
482 

Sadler, John the younger, son of John 
Sadler, and nephew of Hamnet 
Sadler, 37 n 

Sadler, Judith, 32 

Sadler, William, sqn of Hamnet Sadler, 
483 n 

Saffron Walden, players at, 82, 83 « 

Saint Evremond, on friendship and 
love, 219 « I 

Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 711 

St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, Shake- 
speare's residence in, 274; stained 
glass portrait of Shakespeare at, 
540 w 

St. Paul's theatre, 60 « 2 ; performances 
at, 340 seq.; 'Children of St. Paul's,' 
SO, 67 n, 340 

Saint-Saens, Charles C, his opera 
of Henry VIII, 624 

Sainte-Marthe, Scevole de, 712-13 

Salisbury, 377 

Sahsbury Court theatre, 315 w 

Salisbury (or Salusbury), Sir John, 
his patronage of poets, 270, 271, 
273 ; his poems, 273 n i 

Salvini, Tommaso, Italian actor, his 
rendering of Othello, 625 

Sand, George, her translation oi As 
You Like It, and her appreciation of 
Shakespeare, 622 

Sandells, FuLk, 27 and n 2, 29 

Sands, James, 451 ^j i 

Sannazaro, Jacopo, 172, 704, 711 n 2 

Sarrazin, Dr. Gregor, on Shake- 
speare's alleged Italian travels, 87 
n I 

Saunders, Francis, 570 n 

Saunders, Mathew, 678 

Saunderson, Mrs., first actress to 
play Shakespeare's great female 
characters, 601 

Savage, Richard, 237 n 1, 317 n 2, 643 

Saviolo, Vincentio, his Practise and 
As You Like It, 326 

Scenery on the Ehzabethan stage. 
See under Theatres; scenic elabora- 
tion at Court dramatic performances, 
69-70, 69 « I 

Scharf, Sir George, his opinion of 
'Droeshout' engraving, 528; tracing 
of 'Chandos' portrait, 534; his ac- 
count of Shakespeare's portraits, 538 
n 2 

Scheemakers, Peter, his statue of 
Shakespeare, 539 

Schelling, Felix E., 646 



SHAKESPEARE 

Schiller, Friedrich von, his transla- 
tion of Macbeth, 616 

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 597 ; his 
German translation and criticism of 
Shakespeare, 613, 614 

Schlegel, Johann EUas, 612 

Schmidt, Alexander, 644 

Schroder, Friedrich Ulrich Ludwig, 
German actor of Shakespearean 
parts, 616 

Schubert, Franz, 618 

Schiick, H. W., Swedish biographer of 
Shakespeare, 627 

Schumann, Robert, 618 

Scoloker, Anthony, his Daipkantus, 
708 n 3 ; allusions to Hamlet in, 
359-60; his tribute to Shakespeare, 
500 

Scotland, actors' tours to, 83 and 
notes, 84 

Scott, Sir Walter, 35, 502 

Sedley, Sir Charles, his praise of Shake- 
speare, 592 

Selinius, 260 

Seneca, his influence on English drama, 
16, 19 and n i, 22, 91 

Serafino dell' Aquila, Watson's in- 
debtedness to, 148 n 2, 171 and 
w I, 711 w 2 

Seve, Maurice, 173, 701, 711, 713 n 

Severn, Charles, 646 

Sewell, Dr. George, 573, 574 

Shadwell, Thomas, his adaptations of 
Shakespeare, 594 and n 3 

Shakespeare, distribution of the name, 
1—2 ; its significance, i 

Shakespeare, Adam, 2 

Shakespeare, Ann, the dramatist's 
sister, 13 

Shakespeare (bom Hathaway), Anne, 
the dramatist's wife, 26 seq.; her 
cottage, 26-7, 540 ; debtor to 
Thomas Whittington, 280 and n 2 ; 
Shakespeare's bequest of 'second 
best bed ' to, 486-7 ; death, 503 and 
n 2 ; burial, 504 ; epitaph, 504 n i 

Shakespeare, Edmund, the dramatist's 
brother, 13 ; burial in Southwark, 
275, S03 . 

Shakespeare, Gilbert, the dramatist's 
brother, 13, 460-1 and notes; ac- 
count of his brother's acting, 88; 
negotiates in behalf of the poet for 
purchase of land near Stratford, 
318, 460 and n 2; Mrs. Stopes on, 
461 n; burial of, 462 

Shakespeare, Hamnet, the dramatist's 
son, 32 ; death of, 281 



748 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare, Henry, the dramatists' 
uncle, 3 and w 3, 279 

Shakespeare, Joan (i), the dramatist's 
sister, 8 

Shakespeare, Joan (2), the dramatist's 
sister, 13. See under Hart, Mrs. 
Joan 

Shakespeare, John, of Frittenden, 
Kent {fl. 1279), I 

Shakespeare or Shakspere, John, 

• shoemaker at Stratford, confused 
with the dramatist's father, 14 » 4 

Shakespeare, John, son of Richard, of 
Snitterfield, the dramatist's father, 
3 ; settles at Stratford, 4-5 ; his 
business, 5 ; in municipal office, 5-6, 
490 n I ; property, 5 ; characteristics, 
6 and n ; his marriage, 6 ; his family, 
8, 13 ; his tenancy of Shakespeare's 
birthplace, 9-10; alderman and 
baililf at Stratford, 12-13; welcomes 
actors to Stratford, 1 2 ; purchases 
Shakespeare's birthplace, 13 ; his 
alleged puritanism, 13 n; applies 
for coat-of-arms, 2, 13 n, 282 
■ financial difficulties, 14-15, 279-80 
deprived of alderman's gown, 14 
prosecuted for non-attendance at 
church, 279-80; his death, 316 

Shakespeare, Judith, see Quiney, Judith 

Shakespeare, Margaret, the dramatist's 
aunt, i n z 

Shakespeare, Margaret, the dramatist's 
sister, 8 

Shakespeare, Mary, the dramatist's 
mother, parentage and ancestry, 
6, 284-5; her property, 8 ; 289-90; 
her death and burial, 317, 460, 485 

Shakespeare, Richard, the dramatist's 
brother, 13; his death, 461, 503 

Shakespeare, Richard, of Rowington, 2 

Shakespeare, Richard, of Snitterfield 
{d. 1560), probably the dramatist's 
grandfather, 3; his family and 
estate, 3 and n 2 

Shakespeare, Richard of Wroxall, 2-3 

Shakespeare, Susanna, daughter of the 
poet, 29, 281 

Shakespeare, Thomas, 3 

Shakespeare, William, husband of 
Anne Whateley, 30 seq. 

Shakespeare or 'Sakspere,' William, 
of Clapton, Gloucestershire {d. 1248), 
I 

Shakespeare, William, of Rowington, 2 

Shakespeaee, William : ancestry, 
2 seq.; parentage, 3-8; birth and 
baptism, 8 ; birthplace, 8-1 1 ; 



SHAKESPEARE 

brothers and sisters, 13-14; edu- 
cation, 15 seq.; school curriculum, 
16-17; study of Greek and Latin 
classics, 16-17 ; affinities with Greek 
tragedians, 17 w i; study of Itahan 
and French literature, 18-19, 22 ; 
reminiscences of Mantuanus, 18 and 
w 2 ; of Seneca, 19 and n i ; in- 
debtedness to Ovid, 19-22; his use 
of the Bible, 22-3, 23 » 2; youthful 
recreation, 23-4; references to visit 
to Kenilworth, 24 ; withdrawal from 
school, 25; marriage, 26 seq.; the 
marriage bond, 27 seq. ; birth of 
his first daughter, 29 ; his other 
children, 32-3; his knowledge of 
nature and of sport, 33 and n 2 ; 
his poaching adventure at Charle- 
cote, 34 seq. ; prosecution by Sir 
Thomas Lucy, 34-6; flight from 
Stratford, 36 ; migration to London, 
37 seq. ; relations with Richard 
Field, pubhsher, 41-3; his alleged 
legal experience, 43-4 ; early theatri- 
cal employment, 45-6 ; early reputa- 
tion as actor, 46 seq. ; joined Earl 
of Leicester's company, later known 
as the 'King's Servants,' 54; writes 
plays for the company, 55-6 ; at ' The 
Theatre,' 58; his successes at the 
Rose theatre, 61 ; at the Curtain, 61 ; 
prominent in affairs of the Globe 
theatre, 63, and of the Blackfriars 
theatre, 65 ; performs at Court, 
67, 89; his alleged travels in 
England and abroad, 81-6 ; his roles, 
87-8; his view of the acting pro- 
fession, 88 ; his first dramatic efforts, 
90 seq. ; his receptivity, 95 ; as 
actor-dramatist, 96 ; , Ben Jonson's 
criticism of his hasty workmanship, 
98 ; his borrowed plots, 98 ; re- 
vision of old plays, 99; chronology 
of the plays, 100 ; metrical tests, loi 
his use of prose, loi and n 2 ; his 
Love's Labour's Lost [q.v], 102-6 
his Two Gentlemen of Verona [q.v.] 
106—8; his Comedy of Errors [q.v.] 
108-9 ; his Romeo and Juliet [q.v.] 
109-13; his adaptations of others' 
plays, 115 seq.; Henry VI [q.v], 115 
seq. ; attacked by Robert Greene, 116 
seq. ; influence of Marlowe on, 109, 
123, 134-5 ; his Richard III [q.v.], 
123-5; his Richard II [q.v.], 125-9; 
relations with the censor, 127 seq.; 
his Titus Andronicus [q.v.], 129—32; 
his Merchant of Venice [q.v.], 132—7, 



INDEX 



749 



SHAKESPEARE 

his King John [q.v.], 137-9; early- 
plays assigned to, 140 seq. [see under 
Arden of Fever sham and Edward III] ; 
his Venus and Adonis [q.v.], 142-6; 
Lucrece [q.v.], 146-9; tributes to, 
150; Spenser's praise of, 151; his 
popularity at Court, 153; his 
Sonnets [q.v.], 154-95 ; his use of 
sonnet form m his plays, 155 ; 
his relations with the Earl of South- 
ampton, 196-230, 656 seq.; develop- 
ment of dramatic power, 231 seq.; 
his Midsummer Night's Dream [q.v], 
231 seq.; All's Well [q.v.], 234-5; 
Taming of the Shrew [q.v], 235 seq. ; 
Henry IV [q.v], 239 seq. ; his creation 
of FalstaflF, 241 seq. ; Merry Wives of 
Windsor [q.v.], 246 seq. ; Henry V 
[q.v.], 250 seq. ; his use of choruses, 
251—2; relations with the Earl of 
Essex, 252 seq. ; his growing repu- 
tation, 255 ; his share in meetings at 
the 'Mermaid,' 257; praised by 
Meres and other contempora,ries, 
258 seq. ; unprincipled use of his 
name, 260; plays falsely ascribed to, 
260 seq. [see under Locrine; Cromwell, 
Lord; Yorkshire Tragedy, A; Merry 
Devill of Edmonton, The; Car- 
denio; Henry I ; Henry II; King 
Stephen; Duke Humphrey; I phis 
and lantha; Faire Em; Muce- 
dorus] ; his Passionate Pilgrim [q.v], 
267 seq. ; his share in the Phxnix 
and Turtle [q.v.], 270 seq.; his Lon- 
don residences, 274 seq.; taxpayer 
of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, 274; 
in Southwark, 274, 275; in Cheap- 
side, 276 seq. ; alleged residence 
in Shoreditch, 276 n 2 ; his practical 
temperament, 278; his application 
for a coat-of-arms, 281 seq.; pur- 
chase of New Place, 288 ; litigation 
with John Lambert, 289; his po- 
sition among his fellow townsmen, 
290 seq. ; his supply of com and 
malt, 291-2 ; appeals, to, from 
Stratford for aid, 292 seq. ; his 
financial position before 1599, 296; 
acquires theatrical shares, 296 ; his 
fees as dramatist, 296 seq. ; his in- 
come as actor, 298 seq. ; his shares in 
Globe theatre, 300 seq., 304-5 and 
n, 309 ; shares in Blackfriars theatre, 
306 seq., 309 seq. ; his income from 
performances at Court, 313 seq.; 
as 'groom of the Chamber,' 314, 375 
seq. ; later income as actor, and as 



SHAKESPEARE 

dramatist, 314 seq. ; his final income, 
315-16; his parents' death, 316-17; 
formation of his estate at Stratford, 
317 seq.; acquires property near 
Stratford of the Combes, 317; pur- 
chases cottage and land in Chapel 
Lane, 318 ; purchases lease of moiety 
of the tithes of Stratford, 319; re- 
covery of small debts, 321-3 
maturity of his genius, 324 seq. 
Much Ado about Nothing [q.v], 324-5 
As you like it [q.v], 325-7; Twelfth 
Night [q.v.], 327-31; Julius Ccesar 
[q.'o.], 332-6; his share in actor's 
quarrels, 340 seq. ; his Hamlet [q.v.], 
353 seq. ; Troilus and Cressida [q.v], 
365 seq.; his plays at Court, 372-3, 
383 seq.; his Othello [q.v.], 387-9; 
Measure for Measure [q.v], 389-91 ; 
Macbeth [q.v.], 391-5 ; King Lear 
[q.v.], 395-400; Timon of Athens 
[q.v], 400—2 ; Pericles [q.v.], 402—6 
his Antony and Cleopatra [q.v] 
406-10 ; his Coriolanus [q.v.], 410-14 
the latest plays — his tragic period 

415 seq.; his return to romance 

416 seq. ; Cymbeline [q.v.], 419—23 
The Winter's Tale [q.v] 423-5 
The Tempest [q.v], 425—35 ; his 
collaboration with John Fletcher in 
Cardenio [q.v], 436-7 ; Two Noble 
Kinsmen [q.v], 437-9; and Henry 
VIII [q.v], 440-5 ; his retirement to 
Stratford, 448; his financial in- 
terest in London theatres, 449 ; 
visits to Oxford, 449-50; relations 
with Burbage, 452; his device for 
the Earl of Rutland's impresa, 453 
seq. ; his purchase of a house in 
Blackfriars, 456; his htigation 
over the property, 458-9; relations 
with Stratford and neighbourhood, 
459 seq. ; friendship with the 
Combes, 467 seq. ; his attitude to 
the Stratford enclosures, 475 seq. ; 
his will, 479-82, 485 seq.; his death 
and burial, 483 ; his grave, 484 ; 
his bequests, 486 seq. ; his theatrical 
shares, 490 seq. ; his monument, 
494-7, 522-5; pleas for his burial 
in Westminster Abbey, 498 seq. ; 
his character, 500 ; his survivors 
and descendants, 503 seq. ; his 
estate, 512 seq.; autographs, 516 
seq.; his mode of writing, 519; 
spelling of his name, 520-1 ; por- 
traits of, 522-37; his death mask, 
538 ; public memorials, 539-41 ; 



ISO 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



SHAKESPEARE 

quarto and folio editions of his works, 
542-70; his eighteenth-century edi- 
tors, 571-82; nineteenth-century 
editors, 582-4; his reputation in 
England, 586-607 ; on the English 
stage, 600 seg. ; in music and art, 
607-8; reputation in America, 
608-9; his foreign vogue, 610; 
in Germany, 610-18; in France, 
618-24; in Italy, 625-6; in Spain, 
626; in Holland, 627; in Denmark, 
627; in Sweden, 627-8; in Russia, 
628—30; in Poland, 630—1; in Hun- 
gary, 631; in other countries, 632; 
impersonality of his art, 633 ; his 
foreign affinities, 634-5 ! his recep- 
tive faculty, 635-6; his univer- 
sality, 637 

Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on- 
Avon, 540-1 

Shakespeare's Birthplace, 8-12; 
visitors to, 540 

'Shakespeare Society,' The, 598, 645 

'Shakspere Society, The New,' 598 

Shallow, Justice, Sir Thomas Lucy 
caricatured as, 35-6, 240; his 
house in Gloucestershire, 240, 246, 248 

Shanks, John, holder of theatrical 
shares, 303 n, 306 n, 307 n 

Sharp, Thomas, 289 w 

Shaw, Julius, 279, 292 n, 460 n; 
witness to Shakespeare's will, 482 ; 
account of his career, 482 n 2 

Sheldon copy of the First Folio, 
562, 564 

Sheldon, Ralph, 562 n 3 

Sheldon, William, 562 n 3 

Shelton, Thomas, translator of Don 
Quixote, 436 

Sheridan, R. B., 647 

Sherwin, W., 536 

Shiels, Robert, 45 n 

Shoreditch, first theatrical quarter, 
54 n I, 58 and n, 64. See also under 
'The Curtain' and 'The Theatre' 

Short, Peter, printer, 242 n i, 672 

Shorthand versions of plays, 100 n, 
112 n 3 

Shottery, Anne Hathaway's cottage 
at, 26 seq., 540 ; Shakespeare's prop- 
erty at, 293 ; John Combe's property 
at, 468 and n 

Shrewsbury, players at, 82, 83 n, 129 

Sibthorp, Coningsby, his copy of 
the First Folio, 564-5 

Siddons, Mrs., 603 

Sidney, Sir Philip, reference to William 
Kemp, actor, 36 n 2 ; on stage 



scenery, 76-7; his view of early 
Elizabethan drama, 93 ; his lyric 
verse, 95 ; translates verses from 
Montemayor's Diana, 107 n 3; 
his family connections, 377, 455 n; 
brings the sonnet into vogue in 
England, 154 ; publication of his 
sonnets, 15S n; warns readers 
against insincerity of sonnetteers, 
173, 209; Shakespeare's debt to, 
i77> 179, 186; on the conceit of the 
immortalising power of verse, 186, 
187; his praise of 'blackness,' 191; 
his proficiency in mottoes for 
'imprese,' 453 n i; his use of the 
word 'will,' 691; Shakespeare's 
debt to his Arcadia, 399 and w 2, 
403 n I ; his Astrophel and Stella, 
154 seq., 176 n, 700, 703; Nashe's 
praise of, 700 n 3 ; metre of, 165 n 
I ; address to Cupid in, 166 w i 

Sidney, Sir Robert, 662 

Sievers, Eduard Wilhelm, his studies 
of Shakespeare, 616 and n 2 

Silver Street, Cheapside, Shakespeare's 
residence in, 276 seq. and notes 

Simmes (or Sims), Valentine, printer, 
120 n, 125 n I, 242 n i, 360 n 

Simpson, Percy, on Jonson's contri- 
butions to First Folio, 557 n i ; 
on Shakespearean punctuation, 561 
n I 

Singer, Samuel Weller, 583 

Sir Thomas More, fee for performance 
of, 299 n 2 

Sixain or six-lined stanza, its use by 
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lodge, 
I4S-6 

Slater, Martin, also known as Martin, 
83 and n 2, 84 w; law-suit relating 
to, 311 w 

Sly, Christopher, probably drawn 
from life, 236, 237, 238 

Sly, William, actor, member of Lord 
Chamberlain's company, 53 n 2, 
375, 379 n 2, 382 n i ; shareholder 
in Blackfriars theatre, 306, 307 n 
I ; executor of Phillips's will, 451 « i 

Smethwick, John, publisher, 106 n 2 ; 
113 n I, 363, 553, seq., 568 

Smith, Henry, 512 

Smith, Rafe, 462 n 

Smith, Richard, publisher, 703 

Srnith, Sir Thomas, his Common- 
wealth of England cited, 12 w 2 

Smith, Wentworth, plays produced 
by and ascribed to Shakespeare, 
260 and n i, 261 



INDEX 



751 



Smith, William, Rouge Dragon, cen- 
sures actors' heraldic claims, 285 
and 11 3, 2 86 

Smith, William, sonnets of, 2og n, 
672 ; his Chloris, 707 

Smith, William Henry, 651-2 

Smithson, Miss Harriet, actress, 623 

Smyth, Lady Ann, 469 

Smyth, Sir Francis, 469, 477 n 

Snitterfield, birthplace of the drama- 
tist's father, 3-8; Arden property 
at, 3 ; sale of Mary Shakespeare's 
property at, 14 

Snodham, Thomas, printer, 261 

'Soest' or 'Zoust' portrait of Shake- 
speare, 536 

Sokolovski, A. L., Russian translator 
of Shakespeare, 629 

Somers, Sir George, wreck of his 
ship oS the Bermudas, 428-9 

Somerset, Duke of, 535 

Somerset House, Shakespeare's com- 
pany of actors at, 380-1 

Somerville, William, 536 

Sonnet, Gascoigne's definition of, 
16s M I ; meaning of, 267 n 2 ; 
699 n 2 ; vogue of, in Elizabethan 
England, 154 seq., 699-710; form 
of, 164; French and Italian models, 
170-3 ; its vogue in France, 711-13, 
in Italy, 711 and n 2 

Sojinets, Shakespeare's debt to Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, 20 n 3, 21, 180 seq.; 
Shakespeare's view of actor's call- 
ing in, 89 ; the poet's first attempts, 
iSS; majority composed in 1594, 
156-7; a few composed later 
{e.g. cvii. in 1603), 157 ; their liter- 
ary value, 158; circulation in 
manuscript, 158; commended by 
Meres, 159, 177 ; their piratical 
publication in 1609, 160-4; their 
form, 164, 165 ; want of continuity, 
165; the two 'groups,' 166-7; 
main topics of the first 'group,' 
167; of the second 'group,' 168-9, 
re-arrangement in the edition of 
1640, 168; not to be regarded as 
unqualified autobiography, 169-70, 
177, 178; censured by Sir John 
Davies, 175 ; comparative study of, 
177, 178; their borrowed conceits, 
179-186; the poet's claims of 
immortality for his sonnets, 186-9; 
the 'will' sonnets, 190, 690-8; 
the praise of 'blackness,' 191-2 ; 
sonnets of vituperation, 192-4; 
'the dark lady,' 194-5; 'dedica- 



SOUTHAMPTON 

tory' sonnets, and biographic facts, 
196-200; the 'rival poet,' 200-4; 
sonnets of friendship, 205-14; 
Southampton and the sonnets of 
friendship, 222-8; sonnets of in- 
trigue, 214-22; treatment of theme 
of conflict between love and friend- 
ship by other writers, 215-18; the 
likelihood of a personal experience 
in Shakespeare's case, 218-22; 
external evidence of this in Willobie 
his Avisa (1594), 219-21; summary 
of conclusions respecting the son- 
nets, 229, 230; editions of, 543^4; 
extant copies of 1609 edition, 543 
and n 2 

Sonnets, Shakespeare's, quoted with 
explanatory comments: xiv., 180 
n 2; XX., 163 n; xxii., 156 n i; 
xxvi., 196, 198; xxxii., 198; xxxvii., 
200; xxxviii., 184, 199; xxxix., 200, 
213; xlvii., 212; liii., 179; Iv., 185; 
Ivii., 213; Iviii., 213 n; lix., 210 n; 
Ix., 181; bcii., 155 w, 214; Ixiii., 188; 
Ixiv., 182 ; Ixix., 159 n i ; Lxx., 167 ; 
Ixxiii., 155 «; Ixxiv., 200; Ixxvi., 178; 
Ixxviii, 196, 202 ; Ixxx., 203 ; Ixxxi., 
188; xciv., 141, 159; c, 196; ci., 
180 «; ciii., 197; civ., 163 n; cvi., 
106; cvii., 17 « I ; 227, 228, 667; 
cxix., i79»; ex., 89; cxi., 89; cxxx., 
190; cxxxv., cxxx vi., 163 w; cxxxviii., 
156 n; cxliii., 163 n; cxliv., 214 
n; cliv., 166 n; cxxxv-vi., 693, 695, 
697 ; cxxxiv., 697 ; cxhii., 697 

Soothem, John, sonnets to the Earl of 
Oxford, 209 n i 

Sophocles, IT m. 

Soumarakov, Alexander, Russian trans- 
lator of Hamlet and Richard III, 628 

Southampton, players at, 82, 83 n 

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, sec- 
ond Earl of, 656, 657 

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 
third Earl of, as a literary patron, 
107 n 2, 297, 662-8; his relations 
with Shakespeare, 142-4, 148-9, iS3. 
197 seq., 300, 656 ; his parentage and 
birth, 658-8; his career, 657-60; his 
youthful beauty, 223, 658-9; direct 
references to, in the sonnets, 222, 
223 ; his identity with the youth of 
Shakespeare's sonnets of 'friend- 
ship' evidenced by his portraits, 223 
and «, 225, 226 ; his long hair, 226 « ; 
his marriage, 660 ; his relations with 
the Earl of Essex, 253-5, 455; his 
imprisonment, 226-8, 660; his later 



752 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



SOUTHAMPTON 

career, 66i ; his death, 66i ; fascina- 
tion of the drama for, 663 

Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 
first Earl of, 656 

Southwark, Shakespeare's residence in, 
274 seq. 

Southwark Cathedral, Shakespeare 
memorial at, 540 ; stained glass por- 
trait at, 540 n 

Southwell, Robert, manuscript copies of 
his Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears, 
159 n; his Fourefould Meditation, 
162 n I, 677, 678 n I, 679; dedica- 
tion of his Short Rule of Life, 675 

Southwell, alias Bacon, Thomas, 654 

Spain, translations of Shakespeare in, 
626 and n 

Spanish romances in Elizabethan Eng- 
land, 427 « I 

Spenser, Edmund, his use of legal 
phrases, 44, 653 ; treatment of 
Adonis fable, 14s ; his use of the 
'sixain,' 146; his reference to Shake- 
speare, 151-2 ; referred to by Shake- 
speare, 151-2 ; sonnets of, 164-5, 702, 
706 ; translations of sonnets from 
i)u Bellay and Petrarch, 170, 712 ; on 
the immortalising power of verse, 
187 ; adulation of Queen Elizabeth, 
207 and n 1, 227, 374; his sonnet 
to Admiral Lord Charles Howard, 
210; his indebtedness to Ariosto, 
324-5 ; story of Lear in his Faerie 
Queene, 398; burial in Westminster 
Abbey, 498-500; absence of his 
manuscripts, 517-18; dedication of 
the Faerie Queene, 676 

Spielmann, M. H., his view of Shake- 
speare's monument, 523 n; his 
opinion of the 'Flower' portrait of 
Shakespeare, 529, 530 n 2; of the 
'Felton' portrait, 535-6 ; his account 
of Shakespeare's portraits, 538 w 2 

Stael, Mme. de, and the Shakespearean 
controversy in France, 621 

Stafford, Lord, his company of actors 
at Stratford, 24 « 2 

Stafford, Simon, printer, 242 n i 

Stage, Elizabethan, see esp. 75 n i. 
See also under Theatres 

Stampa, Gaspara, 711 w 2 

Stanhope, Sir John, Lord Stanhope of 
Harrington, 381, 383 n 2 

Stansby, William, printer 

Staunton, Howard, 568 n i ; his edition 
of Shakespeare, 582-3 

Steele, Sir Richard, on Betterton's 
rendering of Othello, 600 



■ STRATFORD 

Steevens, George: his edition of the 
Sonnets, 543 ; his edition of Shake- 
speare, 579, 580; his revision of 
Johnson's edition, 579; his critical 
comments, 579, 580; styled the 
'Puck of commentators,' 580; his 
Shakespearean forgeries, 646. See 
also 557 n i, 569 
Stendhal (Henri Beyle), on Shake- 
speare, 622 
Stephen, King, The history of, 263 
Stephenson, H. T., 644 
Stinchcombe Hill, referred to as 'the 

Hill' in Henry IV, 240 
Stone, Nicholas, 495 n 2, 496 n 2 
Stopes, Mrs. Charlotte, her accouiit of 
Shakespeare's bust, 523 n; her 
researches on Shakespeare (cited 
passim), 643 
Storm, G. F., engraver of Shakespeare's 

portrait, 532 « 
Stothard, Thomas, 608 
Stow, John, 38 n 2, 134 n i, 140 
Strange, Lord. See Derby, Earl of 
Straparola, his Notti, and the Merry 

Wives of Windsor, 247 
Strasburg, English actors at, 85 
Stratford-on-Avon, population of, 4 
and n 1 ; settlement by John Shake- 
speare, the dramatist's father, at, 
4-6 ; industries at, 4 and n 2 ; church 
at, S and n 2 ; parish registers at, 
8 » 2 ; Shakespeare's birthplace at, 
8-1 1 ; plague at, 1 2 and n i ; actors 
at, 12, 24 and n 2; grammar school 
and curriculum at, 15-17 (for 
Masters see under Cotton, John; 
Greene, Joseph; Himt, Simon; 
Jenkins, Thomas ; Roche, Walter) ; 
natives of, settled in London, 37 seq. 
{See under Combe, William; Field, 
Richard ; Locke, Roger ; Orrian, 
Allan; Quiney, Richard; Sadler, 
John ; Shakespeare, William ; Wood- 
ward, Richard) ; routes from to Lon- 
don, 39, 40 and n i ; allusions to in 
Taming of the Shrew, 236 ; destruc- 
tive fires at, 290, 466; disastrous 
harvests at, 291 seq.; malting at, 
291 ; appeals for aid to London and 
to Shakespeare, 292-5, 459, 464 n 2 ; 
Shakespeare's purchase of property 
and tithes at, 317-321 ; Shakespeare's 
support for repair of highways, 459, 
460 n I ; Shakespeare's posthumous 
fame at, 598 and n ; Garrick at, 599 ; 
the 'Jubilee' at, 599; the 'Ter- 
centenary' at, 600. See also under 



INDEX 



753 



STRATFORD 

Chapel Lane ; Combe, Thomas and 

William ; Enclosure ; New Place ; 

Shakespeare, William ; 
'Stratford Town' edition, 585 n i 
'Stratford' portrait of Shakespeare, 

525 
Street, Peter, 63 m i 
Stubbes, Philip, his Anatomy of Abuses, 

643 

Sturley, Abraham, bailiff of Stratford- 
on-Avon ; his knowledge of Latin, 
18 « I ; his letter to Richard Quiney, 
293, 2gs n I. See also 319, 460 n 

Suckling, Sir John, 588 

'Sugred,' applied to Shakespeare's 
work, 178, 259 and n i 

Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 607 

Sullivan, Barry, 541 

Sullivan, E. J., 608 

Sullivan, Sir Edward, on Shakespeare's 
Italian travels, 87 m i 

Sully, Mounet, French actor, as Ham- 
let, 624 

Sunday, dramatic performances on, 80, 
338 

Surrey, Earl of, sonnets of, 154, 165 ; 
imitation of Petrarch, 171 m, 699 

Sussex, Earl of, lord chamberlain, 52 ; 
his company of actors, 50 » i ; per- 
formances by, 56 n 2, 131, 398 

Sutton, Thomas, 495 n 2, 496 « 2 

Swan theatre, Bankside, 60 n 2, 274 
n I ; description of interior by John 
de Witt, 74 » I ; seating capacity, 
74 « I ; lawsuit relating to, 311 n 

'Swan and Maidenhead' inn, 10 

Swanston, Hilliard, theatrical share- 
holder, 303 n, 306 n, 307 n 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, his criti- 
cism of Richard III, 124; of Arden 
of Fever sham, 140; of Edward III, 
141. See also 438, 598, 645 

Sylvester, Joshua, 668, 710 and n i 

Symmons, Dr. Charles, 584 



Tahueeau, Jacques, 713 

Taille, Jacques de la, 713 and n 

Taille, Jean de la, 713 and n 

Tailor, Robert, his allusion to Pericles, 

404 n I 
Talma, the French actor, 532 n; as 

Othello, 623 
Taming of A Shrew, The, 235 and notes 
Taming of The Shrew, The, reference 

to travelling companies in, 71 ; early 

German translation of, 85 w i ; pub- 

3C 



THEATRE 

lication of, 113 n i; account of, 
235-8 ; probable date of composi- 
tion, 235 ; its doubtful identity with 
Love's Labour's Won, 234; sources, 
23s, 236 ; biographical bearing of the 
induction, 236-8; editions of, 554 
seg. ; passages cited, 20 n 2, 238, 
356 n 2 

Tamisier, Pierre, 711 « 

Tansillo, Luigi, 711 « 2 

Tarleton, Richard, 151, 247 

Tasso, Bernardo, 711 w 2 

Tasso, Torquato, 22, 711 n 2 ; influence 
of, on Shakespeare, I79wi,2ii,2i2; 
on Spenser,- 706 ; relations with the 
Duke of Ferrara, 211, 212; his dia- 
logue on 'imprese,' 453 n 

Tate, Nahum, 595 

Taylor, John, water-poet, 38 m 2 

Taylor, Joseph, actor and theatrical 
shareholder, 305 n, 306 n, 307 n, 532 

Teares of the Isle of Wight, elegies on 
the Earl of Southampton, 668 

Tell tale, The, 'fair copy' of, 558 « 

Tempest, The, 75, 77, 80 n i, 418, 419, 
420; performed at Court, 89, 420, 
432, 435 and notes, 649 ; use of prose 
in, 102 n; quotation from Mon- 
taigne's Essays in, 156 n, 429; posi- 
tion of, in First Folio, 419 ; first per- 
formance of, 419, 420, and n 2 ; ac- 
count of; 425-34; contrasted with 
Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, 425-6 ; traces 
of the influence of Ovid, 426 ; sources, 
426-9; shipwreck of Sir George 
Somers' fleet off the Bermudas and 
the plot of The Tempest, 428-9; 
significance of Caliban, 429-32 ; 
vogue of, 433 ; fanciful interpreta- 
tions of, 434-5 ; reflects Shake- 
speare's highest imaginative powers, 
434 ; editions of, 554 ; witnessed by 
Pepys, 590; Dryden's and Dave- 
nant's adaptation and ShadweU's 
revision, 594; passages cited, 20, 
32 n 2, 87, 426, 428, 431 n, 432. 

'Temple Shakespeare, The,' 584 

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, his view of 
Edward III, 141 ; metre of his In 
Memoriam, 272 

Terence, 16 

Terry, Miss Ellen, 605 

Tetherton, William, 322 n i 

'Theatre, The,' Shoreditch, the first 
English playhouse, built by James 
Burbage, 51, 52 n 2, 55 ; its site and 
construction, 58 and n; 61 and n i ; 



754 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



change of ownership and demolition, 
62 and n; residence of Shakespeare 
near, 274 ; his shares in, 302 « i ; per- 
formance of the old play of Hamlet 
at, 357 

Theatres, see esp. pp. 58-88 and 60 n 2 ; 
methods of representation, 72 seq.; 
structural plans, 73 ; prices of admis- 
sion, 73 ; the stage, 74 seq. ; the set 
scenery, 76 ; crudity of scenic appa- 
ratus, 76-7 and n 2 ; costume, 77 and 
n 3, 78, 308 n ; absence of women 
actors, 78-9 and n ; programmes and 
advertisements at, 79-80 ; music at, 
79 ; Sunday performances at, 80 ; 
Puritan outcry against, 80; prohi- 
bition of during Lent and seasons of 
plague, 80; time of performances, 81 
and n i ; value of shares in, 312 « i ; 
city's attempt to suppress, 336-9. 
See also under Blackfriars, Cockpit, 
Crosskeys, Curtain, Fortune, Globe, 
Hope, Inn yards, Newington Butts, 
Phoenix, 'Private' theatres, Red 
Bull, Rose, Swan, The Theatre, 
Whitefriars 

Theatrical lawsuits. See 309 n 

Theobald, Lewis, his emendations of 
Hamlet, 364 ; his play Double False- 
hood alleged to be by Shakespeare, 
436 and n 3, 437 and n i ; his criti- 
cism of Pope, 574; his edition of 
Shakespeare, 574, 575 and notes; his 
textual emendations, 575 and notes, 
576; his editorial fees, 575 n 2, 596 

Theobalds, royal palace at, 69 

Thimm, Franz, 645 

Thomas, Ambroise, his opera of 
Hamlet, 624 

Thompson, John, engraver, 584 

Thoms, W. J., 643 

Thomson, Hugh, 608 

Thomson, James, 595 

Thoresbie, WilUam, 458 

Thornbury, G. W., 643 

Thorpe, Thomas, piratical publisher of 
Shakespeare's sonnets, 160-4, 544. 
SS3> ', his relations with Marlowe, 160 ; 
adds A Lover's Complaint to the 
collection of sonnets, 161 ; his bom- 
bastic dedication to 'Mr. W. H.,' 
162, 164; his arrangement of the 
'Sonnets,' 168; the true history of, 
and 'Mr. W. H.,' 669-81 

Thrale, Henry, 63 w 4 

Thyard, Pontus de, 712 

Tieck, Ludwig, German translator of 
Shakespeare, 614 



Tilney, Edmund, 383 n 

Timon of Athens, 75, 400-1; date of 
composition, 400; a previous play 
on the same subject, 400 and n i ; 
sources, 400-1 ; the divided author- 
ship, 401 ; Shadwell's revision, 595 

Tito Andronico: a German play, 
131 n 2 

Tito and Gesippo, story of, 216 and 
n 3, 217 and n i 

Titus Andronicus, acted by Earl of 
Pembroke's company, 56, 131; and 
by Lord Sussex's men, 56 n 2, 131 ; 
performed in Germany, 85 n i ; 
publication of, 112 n 3, 130-1 ; 
Meres's reference to, 130 ; Ravens- 
croft's assertion as to its authenticity, 
130; Shakespeare's share in, 130; 
his coadjutors, 131 ; plays on the 
theme, 131 and n 2; editions of, 
13 1-2, 548; mentioned by Meres, 
258-9; passages cited, 19 n i, 
20 n I, 34 

Titus and Vespasian, 131 and n 2 

Tofte, Robert, describes performance 
of Love's Labour's Lost, 102 and n i ; 
his Laura, 708, 709 ; his Alba, 708 n 3 

Tolstoy, his attack on Shakespeare, 
629, 630 and n i 

Tompson, John, 279 

Tonson, Jacob, bookseller, 573, 574 
and n 

Tooke, John Home, his copy of the 
First Folio, 562 and n 4 

Tooley, Nicholas, 451 w i 

Tottel, Henry, 699 

Tourgeniev, influence of Shakespeare 
on, 629 

Tragicomedy, definition of, 417, 418 
n I ; first experiments in, due to 
Italian or Franco-Italian influence, 
417 ; vogue of, assured by Beaumont 
and Fletcher in The Faithful Shep- 
herdess, Philaster, and A King and no 
King, 418; other Elizabethan tragi- 
comedies, 417 and n i, 418 and n i ; 
Shakespeare's contributions to, 41 7-8 

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 605 
and n 2 

Treherne, John, 495 n 2 

Trinity College, Cambridge, collection 
of quartos at, 551 

Troilus and Cressida, 365-71; use of 
prose in, loi n 2 ; reference to 
theatrical shares in, 303 n; date of 
production, 365-6; the quarto 
edition of 1609, 367-8; the First 
Folio version of, 368 and n i, 561 



INDEX 



755 



seq.; treatment of the theme, 368; 
plot drawn from mediaeval not from 
classical tradition, 370; attempt to 
treat play as Shakespeare's contribu- 
tion to controversy between Jonson, 
Marston, and Dekker, 371 n i ; 
Dryden's adaptation, 594-5 ; pas- 
sages cited, 349, 430, 653 H I 

Trundell, John, stationer, 360 and » 2 

Turbervile, George, 699 n 2 

Turbutt, W. G., his copy of the First 
Folio, 566 and n i 

Turner, Charles, 535 

Turton, Thomas, bishop of Ely, 530 

Twain, Mark, 655 

Twelfth Night, use of prose in, loi n 2 ; 
account of, 327-31 ; date of produc- 
tion, 327 ; allusion to the 'new map,' 

327 and n 3 ; produced at Court, 327 ; 
at Middle Temple Hall, 71, 328; 
Maimingham's description of, 328, 
420; Italian sources of, 98, 328-9; 
the new characters, 331 ; publication 
of, 331, 332 ; reference to Puritans 
in, 463 n 3 ; editions of, 554 ; pas- 
sages cited, 29 w I ; 32 « i ; 186 n 2 ; 

328 w I ; 463 « 3 _ 

Twine, Laurence, his translation of 
Apollonius of Tyre, 403 n 2 

Twiss, F., 645 n 

Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, early 
German rendering, 85 » i ; debt to 
John Lyly, 106,107; sources of, 107 
and n 1 ; debt to Montemayor, 107 
and n; publication of, 108; refer- 
ence to sonnetteering in, 175 ; the 
struggle of friendship with love in, 
218; mentioned by Meres, 259; 
editions of, 554; passages cited, 87, 
17s 

Two Italian Gentlemen, 106, 107 and n i 

Two Noble Kinsmen, 216, 437-9 ; attrib- 
uted to Fletcher and Shakespeare, 
437. 438 ; plot drawn from Chaucer's 
Knight's Tale, 438; Shakespeare's 
alleged share in, 438-9 ; Massinger's 
alleged share in, 439; D'Avenant's 
adaptation of, 594 

Tyler, Thomas, on the Sonnets, 162 n, 
682 n, 689 n, 696 n 



Udall, Nicholas, his Ralph Roister 

Doister, 91 
Ulrici : his criticism of Shakespeare, 616 
Underbill, Fulk, 288 
Underbill, Hercules, 288 



Underbill, William, owner of New 

Place, 288 
Underwood, John, his will, 61 n 2; 

shareholder in Curtain theatre, 302 

mi; in Globe theatre, 305 n; in 

Blackfriars, 305 n; 307 n 
University dramatic performances, 71 



Vandergucht, Gerard, bis crayon 
copy and engraving of the ' Cbandos' 
portrait, 533-4 

Variorum editions of Shakespeare, 581, 
582 

Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, 713 n 

VautrolUer, Thomas, Huguenot printer 
of London, 41—2, 334 

Vega, Lope de, no w 

Velasco, Juan Fernandez de, duke de 
Frias, Constable of Castile, enter- 
tained at Somerset House, 380-2 

Venesyon Comedy, The, 136 

Vengerov, Prof., Russian translator of 
Shakespeare, 629 

Venus and Adonis, publication of, 42, 
142 ; the dedicatory letter to the 
Earl of Southampton, 142 ; its 
debt to Ovid, 144; influence of 
Lodge, 145-6 ; vogue of the classical 
story, 145 and 146 n i ; the metre, 
146; the poem's popularity, 149; 
editions, 150-1, 542; praised by 
Meres, 177, 259; Gabriel Harvey's 
mention, 358 and n i ; extant copies 
of early editions, 542 n 3 ; passage 
cited, 186 

Verdi, his operas of Macbeth, Othello, 
and Falstajf, 626 

Vere, Lady Elizabeth, 232, 659 

Verney, Sir Richard, 469 

Vernon, Mistress Elizabeth, 660 

Verona, statue of Shakespeare at, 540 

Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 581 n 

Verreiken, Louis, 66 n i, 382 n i 

Verri, Alessandro, Italian translator of 
Hamlet and Othello, 625 

Vertue, George : his engraving of 
Shakespeare's monument, 523-4; of 
'Chandos' portrait, 533; of a 
miniature of Shakespeare, 536 

Vietor, Wilbelm, 644 

Vigny, Alfred de, his version of Othello, 
622 

Villemain, on Shakespeare, 622 

Vincent, Augustine, 565 and n 

Virgil, 16, 21, 22 



7S6 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Virginia, expeditions to, equipped by 

Southampton, 66i 
Virginia Company, 66 1 
Visor, William, in Henry IV, 240 
Visscher, his view of London, 63 « 2 
Voltaire, adverse criticisms of Shake- 
speare by, 619 and n i, 620, 621, 622 ; 
opponents of his views in France, 
619-20 
Voss, J. H., German translator of 
Shakespeare, 614 



Wales, Henry, Prince of, his patronage 
of actors, 376 n 2 

Walker, Barbara! See mider Clopton, 
Lady 

Walker, Sir Edward, 513 and n 3 

Walker, Henry of Stratford, 316 and 
n I, 457, 460 n, 469 n 

Walker, Henry, citizen of London, 316 
n I 

Walker, R., publisher, 574 n 

Walker, W. Sidney, on Shakespeare's 
versification, 597 n i 

Walker, William, godson of the drama- 
tist, 316 and n, 469 n, 489 

Walkley, Thomas, publisher, 387, 677 

Wallace, Charles William, his Shake- 
spearean researches, quoted passim 
{see esp. 62-6 and notes, 71 n, 74 n i, 
643) ; his researches into Shake- 
speare's residence in Silver Street, 
276^2; his researches into theatrical 
lawsuits, 310 w; discovery of docu- 
ments relating to Shakespeare's 
Blackfriars property, 459 n 2 

Waller, Lewis, 606 

Walley, Henry, publisher, 366 

Walmisley, Gilbert, 514 n 

Walsh, C. M., on the Sonnets, 162 n 

Walsingham, Sir Francis, 36 n 2, 55 n 1 

Walton, Izaak, 38 « 2 

Warburton, John, 264 and n i 

Warburton, William, bishop of Glouces- ' 
ter, his edition of Shakespeare, 577 ; 
his editorial fees, 575 n i 

Ward, Sir A. W., 646 

Ward, J. Q. A., his statue of Shake- 
speare in New York, 539 

Ward, John, actor, 524 

Ward, John, vicar of Stratford-on- 
Avon; notices of Shakespeare, 315, 
448 n, 59S ; account of Shakespeare's 
death, 480 ; his diary, 641 

Ward, William, engraving of Shake- 
speare's portrait, 525 



Warner, Sir George, 649 

Warner, Mrs. Mary, actress, 604 

Warner, Walter, 297 n 2 

Warner, William, translation of Plau- 
tus' comedies, 109 ; the story of Lear 
in his Albion's England, 398 

Warren, John, 544 

Warwick, Ambrose Dudlej', Earl of, 
his company of actors at Stratford, 
24 w 2 ; lord of the manor of Rowing- 
ton, 318 

Watkins, Richard, printer, 671 

Watson, Thomas, sonnets of, 95, 154, 
170, 171, 699-700, 704; their publi- 
cation, 158 n; their foreign origin, 
148 and n 2, 171 and n i; Shake- 
speare's debt to, 178; Daniel's debt 
to, 707. See also 665 n i, 675 

Webb, Judge, 655 

Webbe, Alexander, 14 

Webbe, Robert, 14 

Webster, John, his use of legal phrases, 
44 and n ; his share in Casar's Fall, 
336; his tribute to Shakespeare, 
SOI n; loss of his manuscripts, 517 

Weelkes, Thomas, 268 m 

Weever, John, his praise of Venus 
and Adonis and Lucrece, 150; his 
Mirror of Martyrs, 245 ; allusion 
in, to Antony's speech at Caesar's 
funeral, 332 w 2 

Welcombe, enclosure of common lands 
at, 473 seq. 

Welles, Thomas, of Carleton, Bed- 
fordshire, 'cousin' to Lady Bernard, 
321 n 4 

West, Benjamin, 608 

Westminster Abbey, resting-place of 
Chaucer and of Shakespeare's con- 
temporaries, 498-500; poetic pleas 
for Shakespeare's burial in, 498--9 

Westward for Smelts, collection of 
stories called, 248 n; 421 

Whatcote, Robert, 462 ; witness of 
Shakespeare's will, 483 and n i 

Whateley, Anne, 30 seg. 

Whately, Archbishop Richard, 651 

Whately, Thomas, 597 

Wheler, R. B., his papers at Strat- 
ford, 4 w I ; his works on Shake- 
speare, 643 

Whetstone, George, his Promos and 
Cassandra, 390; his Heptameron 
of Ciuill Discourses, 390 

White, Blanco, 626 

White, E. J., 644 

White, Edward, 132 and n 2 

White, Richard Grant, 584 



INDEX 



757 



White, William, printer, io6 n i ; 
1 20 n, 404 n 2 

White, W. A., 609 

Whitefriars theatre, 60 n 2, 66 n 3 ; 
shareholders in, 302 n i, 303; law- 
suits relating to, 303 n i, 311 n; 
value of share in, 312 n i 

Whitehall, royal palace at, perform- 
ances at, 69, is3, 378, 381, 383-4, 
38s, 386 and n, 395. 4i6, 4S4> 661, 
686 

Whittington, Thomas, of Shottery, 
creditor of Shakespeare's wife, 26 n, 
280 and n i 

Widener, Harry E., 568 

Wieland, Christoph Martin, 612 

Wilkins, George, his collaboration 
with Shakespeare in Tinion of 
Athens and Pericles, 402, 406; his 
Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 402 ; 
his novel of Pericles, 406 and n 1, 
n 2 

Wilks, Robert, actor, 601 

' Will' sonnets, the, igo, 690-8; Eliza- 
bethan meanings of 'will,' 690; 
Shakespeare's use of word 'will,' 
691-2 ; Shakespeare's puns on the 
word 'wUl,' 692-3; the play upon 
'wish' and 'will,' 692, 693; inter- 
pretation of the word in Sonnets 
cxxxiv, cxxxv, cxxxvi, cxliii, 693-8 

Willis, R., 24 n i 

WilHs, Judge, 655 

Willobie his Avisa, 219-21, 708 n 3 

Wilmcote, native place of Shakespeare's 
mother, 6, 282 seq. ; alleged refer- 
ence in Taming of the Shrew to, 238 

Wilson, J., 535 

Wilson, Robert, actor and dramatist, 
51 w I, 97 » I, 134 » I ; anticipates 
Shakespeare's Shylock in his Three 
Ladies of London, 134 and n i ; part 
author of play of Oldcastle, 244 

Wilson, Thomas, 107 n 2 

Wilton, Shakespeare and his company 
at, 377, 686 and n 

Winchester, players at, 82, 83 n 

Winchester, Bishop of, jurisdiction of, 

275 
Wincot (in the Taming of the Shrew), 

its identification, 237, 238 
Windsor, royal palace at, 69, 153, 247, 

S68 
Winsor, Justin, his Bibliography of 

Quartos and Folios of Shakespeare, 

551 n I 
Winstanley, William, 265 
Winter'' s Tale, A, performed at Court, 



89, 420, 423, 433, 649 ; prose in, 102 n 
418, 419, 420; position of, in First 
Foho, 419; first performance of 
at the Globe, 420, 423-5 ; notice 
by Simon Forman, 420 ; account of, 
423-25 ; based on Qre.tnt' sPandosto, 
98, 423, 424; Shakespeare's innova- 
tions, 424, 425 ; his presentment 
of country life, of boyhood, 425 ; 
of girlhood, 425, 434; reference to 
Puritans in, 463 n 3 ; editions of, 
554; passages cited, 423 n, 425 n, 

463 n 3 

Wire, use of the word, for women's 
hair, 190 and n 2 

Wise, Andrew, pubHsher, 125 n, 242 n 

Wise, John R., 643 

Wislicenus, Paul, his Shakespeare's 
Totenmaske, 538 n i 

Wither, George, his indictment of 
publishers, 100 n. See also 668, 
708 n 3 

Wits, or Sport upon Sport, The, 74 « i 

Witter, John, shareholder in Globe 
theatre, 305 ; lawsuit relating to, 
310 w; estimate of the value of his 
share, 310 

Wivell, Abraham, his account of 
Shakespeare's portraits, 538 n 2 

Women actors, absence of, from 
Elizabethan stage, 78-9 and notes; 
first introduced by Thomas Killi- 
grew, 592 n ; the first women actors 
in Shakespearean parts, 600-1 

Woncot in Henry IV identified as 
Woodmancote, 240 

Wood, Anthony a, 449 

Woodmancote. See Woncot 

Woodward, Richard, 37 « 

Worcester, Earl of, his company of 
actors at Stratford, 12-13, 24 w 2; 
his company of actors on the Conti- 
nent, 86 n; taken under patronage 
of Anne of Denmark, 96, 376 w i 

Wordsworth, Charles, on Shake- 
speare's knowledge of the Bible, 
23 w 2 

Wordsworth, William, the poet, on 
German aesthetic criticism of Shake- 
speare, 614 and n 2 

Wotton, Sir Henry, on the burning of 
the Globe theatre, 446 « i ; on the 
Earl of Rutland's entertainment of 
King James I, 455 and n 2 ; letter 
to Sir Edmund Bacon, 654 n 2 

Wright, John, bookseller, 160 

Wright, John Michael, his chalk draw- 
ing of Shakespeare's portrait, 536 



758 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



Wright, Thomas, 536 

Wright, W. Aldis, 582, 585 n 

Wriothesley, Lord, 661 

Wroxall, Shakespeares at, 2-3 

Wulff, P. F., Danish translator of 

Shakespeare, 627 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, sonnets of, 154, 

165; his translations of Petrarch's 

sonnets, 171 n i, 6g9 
Wyman, W. H., 652 n 
Wyndham, George, on the sonnets, 

162 n, 180 n I, 693 n 

Xenophon Ephesius, 1 10 w 



Yale, copy of First Folio at, 566 

Yonge, Bartholomew, 107 n 2 

York, players at, 82, 83 n, 130 ; miracle 

plays at, gi n 
Yorkshire Tragedy, A, 262, 402 
Young, Edward, 595 
Young, William, 646 

Zepheria, 702, 705, 706 

Zincke, his fraudulent Shakespeare 
portraits, 532 w 

Zouch, John, 706 

Zucchero, alleged portraits of Shake- 
speare by, 531 n 3 



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